Shmoop Offers Fun, Plain-Spoken Digital Textbooks

America’s education system faces significant challenges: high drop-out rates, disengaged students, math and science scores that are losing ground to those of other developed countries, and radically tightening budgets that are forcing states to cut staffs and programs. Recently, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he may call for a $5 billion cut to the state’s education budget.

Yet, tech community leaders, including Ellen Siminoff, believe that we are on the verge of a great new era of innovation in education. Siminoff was a founding executive of Internet pioneer Yahoo! and is now President and CEO of Shmoop, a digital textbook start-up in Silicon Valley.

“Print textbooks have lagged behind technological change for decades. Print textbooks are enormously expensive, they’re often not fun and engaging for students, and they are costly to update year-after-year. For Millenials who grew up with Nintendo, MySpace, and Facebook, a print textbook no longer matches the way that these students experience the world,” said Siminoff.

Shmoop launched its public Beta in November, 2008 and already has over 250 topics available in literature, US history, and poetry. Siminoff says that Shmoop adds new topics every few weeks and that they will expand into new subject areas. Shmoop also offers teacher resources

What makes Shmoop different?

• Shmoop is fun and plain-spoken. It makes jokes and pop culture references to keep students’ interest. (e.g. Shmoop compares scenes from The Great Gatsby to the extravagant Hamptons parties thrown by the rapper Puff Daddy.
• Shmoop’s content is currently free and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Siminoff says that Shmoop plans to offer premium content and services that will enable it to keep its current library of content freely available to students and schools.
• Shmoop is written by experts and teachers. Most of Shmoop’s writers are Ph.D. and Masters students at top U.S. universities, such as Stanford, Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Yale. Many other online study resources (most notably, Wikipedia) cannot be used as a reference source for academic papers. Shmoop, however, helps students easily create bibliography citations of its materials.
• Shmoop is a textbook built for the Web – with links, photos, video, and audio. Shmoop helps students find the best resources across the Internet for futher study.

Siminoff says that Shmoop is just getting started and welcomes suggestions, feedback, and requests from parents, teachers, and students.

About Ellen

Ellen Siminoff was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and is a prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, living in Los Altos Hills, California.  

Siminoff was a founding executive and Senior Vice President of Yahoo!, where she ran business development, corporate development, and the small business and entertainment business units between 1996 and 2002.  

Siminoff is currently Chief Executive Officer of Shmoop, an educational website. She is Chairman and former CEO of Efficient Frontier. In her 5 years as CEO, Siminoff built Efficient Frontier into the largest buyer of search advertising keywords on Google and one of the 25 most valuable privately-held companies in Silicon Valley, at an estimated $275 million valuation, according to Silicon Alley Insider.  

In 2005, Forbes Magazine named her one of their Masters of Information. Siminoff is often quoted in the New York Times as an Internet industry commentator. Siminoff is known as a fervent fan of the Green Bay Packers. Forbes Magazine noted that Siminoff "believes it's bad luck to talk to her mother before her beloved Green Bay Packers are scheduled to play."  

Siminoff attended Princeton University for her undergraduate studies and Stanford Business School for her MBA.

About Shmoop

Shmoop is a free online homework and writing helper designed to make studying and writing more fun and relevant for students in the digital age. The site provides colorful summaries with pop culture references to help students relate to course content and also helps parents by providing study questions to help their kids. Shmoop’s original content is created by PHD students and written in a fun and snarky voice for teens that grew up with MySpace, video games and YouTube.  The teacher-approved site offers content, deep analysis, study questions, audio and video links, and cram sheets to help students study more effectively and improve their grades. Shmoop covers literature, poetry, and US History with more subjects coming soon. Shmoop is headquartered in Mountain View, California.