Curious.com

Let’s chat! Introducing Curious Conversations

We’re so excited to introduce Curious Conversations, a brand new series featuring live interviews with leading experts from around the world. These intimate conversations will be broadcast from our studios in front of a live audience!

You can get a front row seat without leaving the house. Join the Conversation online, and ask questions live to get them answered on air.

We’re kicking off our Curious Conversation Summer Series with Brandon Bond, an experienced disaster preparedness specialist, in conversation with Curious CEO Justin Kitch. Learn why duct tape, coffee grounds, and headlamps should be a part of your disaster kit, and how to be as ready as possible for any emergency.

So grab your virtual chair, a glass of iced tea (or wine?) and join us for a good old fashioned summer evening “visit” with some of the most interesting and helpful people.

Tick tock, it’s time to learn

Make learning even easier with the new Apple Watch and Curious app.

Scroll through the full CuriousTV schedule for all 10 channels on your wrist 24/7.

Swipe through to see what’s playing on all 10 channels: Biz, Brainy, Code, Craft, Food, Health, Life, Music, Photo, and Tech.

 

See something interesting? Click on it to RSVP.

When it’s time to learn, you’ll get a reminder right to your watch screen. Learning has never been so timely.

Turn binge watching into a healthy indulgence

Finally, you can binge watch without guilt!

Before you had House of Cards, Madmen, and Game of Thrones. Now you have CuriousTV.

Settle in and binge-learn anytime with CuriousTV, our new 24/7 free learning service. You can watch content from our library of more than 15,000 lessons on any of our 10 channels, including Biz, Music, Tech, Photo, Craft, Life, Code, Health, Brainy, and Food.

Check out the TV Guide and RSVP for upcoming content. Get a reminder when it’s playing, and invite friends and family to learn along with you.

Tune in for live learning sessions from the Curious studio that will include live demonstrations and guest interviews. Ask questions live, and get feedback on air from the teacher.

Learning has never been so easy. Go to Curious.com and click on the CuriousTV icon or download our app to discover something new.

 

Introducing 📺 CuriousTV!

3,2,1… and we’re on the air!

Introducing a brand new way to learn at Curious. It’s called CuriousTV. We think you’ll agree it’s super cool. Addictive even. Plus it’s totally FREE!

WATCH CURIOUS TV NOW

 

Starting immediately, hundreds of our best courses are broadcasting 24 x 7 on 10 channels: Biz, Brainy, Code, Craft, Food, Health, Life, Music, Photo, and Tech.

Your Daily Curio email will now include a CuriousTV guide. RSVP to “shows” you want to watch and we'll reminded you when they are about to air.

Curious+ subscribers will have access to special LIVE sessions starting in May.

We’ve also made some big changes to Curious.com to make it easier for you to discover new things to learn. We’ve created 100+ subcategories:

And a My Lessons “drawer” containing lessons you’ve watched, or want to watch later:

Finally, we've streamlined and beautified the Curious Lesson Player:

We’d love to hear what you think about the new Curious! Reply to this email or connect with us using the social links below. And, as always, happy learning!

Justin and the entire Curious Crew

52 Weeks of Learning Curiously

Congrats on a year of learning! For the past 52 weeks, Curious students across the world have been stretching their learning muscles, picking up 52 new skills along the way. When we launched the Curious 52 Challenge last January, we never guessed that there would be this much excitement.

Each week of 2014, thousands of Challengers took on a new lesson, tackling everything from salsa dancing, to extracting strawberry DNA, to wooing someone in French, to baking Joyce Maynard’s famous apple pie. Who said learning can’t be fun?

With 52 lessons in the books, we’d like to thank our loyal Curious students for their commitment to lifelong learning over the past year--we couldn’t have done it without you! We’d also like to give a huge congratulations to our Challengers who successfully completed all 52 lessons and won a free iPad and a year of free learning.

One of the main reasons we work at Curious is because we are passionate about learning new things. We had so much fun taking the Challenge with you this year, and we can’t wait to see what you learn in 2015.

Cheers to another year of living Curiously!

Gift a course and get one free!

We believe learning is a gift. Now you can give some knowledge and get some for yourself too! Simply gift any course and a little elf will put the same amount into your account.

Need a little inspiration? Check out our great list of gifts and our handy gift guides.

Promotion ends December 18, 2014

Give the Gift of Learning

Gone are the days of gifting fuzzy socks, impersonal gift cards, and tacky sweaters. Give your loved ones the gift of learning instead.

Starting today you can gift any course. All you have to do is go to Curious.com and click on the gift icon next to any course. You can add a personal message and even schedule a delivery date so they get it when you want them to.

The best part? Our gifts are guaranteed to fit and you don’t have to wait in line for them.

Why give a gift that will end up lost in the back of the closet when you can give the gift of learning?

Shop now at Curious.com.

New Crafting App!

Designed for our craftiest learners, this customized app features thousands of fun lessons on topics such as crocheting, sewing, jewelry making, clothes making, scrapbooking, origami, upcycling, card making, and woodworking.

Check out these fun features!

• Explore new lessons by categories.

• Share your amazing creations with friends and the teacher by submitting your projects to the Assignment Gallery.

• Get feedback from the teacher and fellow crafters on lesson-specific discussion boards.

Download Curious Crafts today on your iPad or iPhone. We’d love to hear what you think!

Teacher Appreciation Week

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! We are getting in on the fun by encouraging you all to recognize your favorite teachers on Curious. If you publicly recognize a Curious teacher via Twitter, we will give them a $5 tip on your behalf, and also give you $5 to spend on any of their lessons. 

Here's how (you will need a Twitter account):

1. Send a tweet in the rough format of: "Thanks to @curious teacher @summertomato for being awesome! #iamcurious #thankateacher"
2. Link to their Curious teacher profile at www.curious.com/teachername.
3. If you don't know the teacher's Twitter handle just use their Curious teacher name. 
4. Email your tweet to [email protected] so we can credit your account $5 of coins.
5. We will tip the teacher $5.

Show your love for our amazing teachers! Without them Curious would be pretty boring...
--jsk

Follow Curious on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

 

Happy first birthday, Curious!

Today Curious is celebrating our first year of public life--our birthday, so to speak. Curious launched on May 1st, 2013 with the hope that there were other people in the world like us. People who loved to learn things, and who felt learning could be just as fun as watching a movie or playing a video game. Plus we were pretty sure thousands of amazing teachers would be eager to reach the world's lifelong learners.

Well, I guess we were right.

In one short year over 1000 teachers have joined the Curious revolution, and produced over 6000 lessons so far--with hundreds more added every week.

Those lessons have already been viewed over 2 million times. We get to watch the vibrant community of Curious learners and teachers blossoming more every day--and it feels really great. It's those teachers and learners that are why we have had such a successful year, and why I'm pretty confident there are a lot of birthday celebrations in our future.

To all of you who have believed in the Curious way of lifelong learning--THANK YOU! Or should I say, happy birthday? Think of it as the first year of the rest of your life of learning.
--jsk

P.S. I hope you enjoy the above video, which gives you a peak at Curious World Headquarters and our unbelievable team of passionate employees. Without them, Curious would still be just a twinkle in our eye. Here's a HUGE fist bump, you guys!

Curious is secure

Curious.com is secure.
Like more than half of the internet, we had to move quickly to get ahead of the heartbleed vulnerability last week.  We found out about it on Monday along with the rest of the engineering community, and immediately took steps to patch our servers, followed shortly after by updating our encryption keys.

How does this affect you on Curious?
We think it's highly unlikely that we were a target or that any of your data was stolen. We require very little sensitive data (first name, last name, email, and password) and we use a 3rd party for credit transactions, so our servers never see a credit card number. As a precautionary measure, you may want to change your Curious password here if you are concerned.

What steps should you take elsewhere?
For any sites that have sensitive data, we recommend changing your password, and avoid re-using passwords or password patterns.  We know this is a pain, so this might be a good time to get a password manager (LastPass and 1Password are both good - see this article for comparisons). For more advice on password security, see this.

On behalf of the Internet, we'd like to apologize for the inconvenience.  We also use the web, so we feel your pain.

Now get back to learning; it’s more fun than password security.

Curious

Follow Curious on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

Exciting news at Curious today!

Exciting news coming out of Curious World Headquarters today! First, we are proud to announce a partnership with GSV Capital, who is leading a new $15M investment in Curious <blush>. Second, we are announcing our first 50 Courses (or series of lessons) on topics ranging from Indie Filmaking 101 to Salsa Dancing for Beginners to Night Photography Unlocked to Cheese Making 101.  We are also introducing the option for learners to tip teachers after a lesson is completed, to show your favorite Curious teachers some love. 

Stay curious!

--jsk

Follow Curious on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

Curious wins Tabby Award for Best Education App

High fives to all of the fantastic teachers on Curious.com. Tab Times just awarded Curious a Tabby Award for the Best Education and Training App! The Tabby Awards /Business is the only competition for the best business and productivity tablet apps on all major platforms -- iOS, Android, and Windows 8.

Our goal for Curious on the iPad is to make online learning even easier. With the iPad app, you can truly learn from anywhere -- take the iPad into the kitchen for a cooking lesson, into the garage to learn how to change a part, or to your friend’s house for a refresh about famous Presidents in history. The options are endless-- teachers and students constantly contribute to the community in new and exciting ways.

We believe Curious is perfect for anyone who believes learning can be enjoyable and should be a “lifelong” endeavor.

What did the judges say about the Curious app? “Easy to use. True to the category and well-executed. It’s a well done training/education app with a wonderful concept and approach to lifelong learning modules at your fingertips.”

Thanks Tab Times!

Check out the full TabTimes article here: The Tabby Awards /Business 2013 winners: The best 18 tablet apps for work.

 

Follow Curious on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

 

Curious, Act II

Last week we announced the second phase of Curious’ plan for world domination: opening up the Curious publishing platform to all teachers (of all topics).  When we launched Curious this May we started with over 100 hand-picked teachers offering over 500 lessons in topics ranging from pipe soldering to beer brewing to Calculus.  Those numbers have now swelled to over 400 teachers and 3000 lessons, but we’ve still been inviting teachers onto the platform.

On Friday we officially opened up our lesson-building platform to anybody who wants to teach on Curious--no application required. This is a really exciting step for us because we’ve always intended Curious to be a place where teachers of anything can reach the world’s learners without our intervention.  But to do this has required a lot of work.

First, we had to perfect the Curious LessonBuilder, which is the online software that turns flat videos into interactive Curious Lessons. If you’ve taken lessons on Curious you know that we have our own LessonPlayer that breaks lessons into conceptual sections, offers clever exercises to make sure you are paying attention, and allows documents or products to be attached to the lesson.  You can even send videos or photos to the teacher for feedback.  The LessonBuilder software is the way that we have been “assembling” Curious lessons internally, and its WYSIWYG nature has evolved to the point that we feel it is ready for the outside world to use.

Besides the LessonBuilder, we also knew it would be critical to provide a set of tools and resources that helped our new teachers be able to leverage the Curious platform.  That’s why we created the Curious Teachers’ Lounge, which includes a learning center, a promo center, and a comment manager--all essential tools for success in online teaching. You can go to www.curious.com/teach and see demos of these tools in action, or go to www.curious.com/curiousteachersupport to watch Curious lessons on how to teach with Curious (so meta!). Or just sign up to be a teacher and give it a shot.

We know world domination is going to take longer than five months, but it’s fun to be ahead of schedule.  :o)

--jsk

Originally posted on CEO Unplugged.

Pinterest Party | Announcing Winner of the iPad Mini

Thank you to everyone who joined our Pinterest Party! You shared hundreds of your favorite Curious lessons and we are excited to see your passion for learning. Be sure to follow us on Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter to keep up with the latest!

And, drumroll, please... The winner of the iPad Mini for the Pinterest Party is Amy Pugmire - congratulations! We'll direct message you on Twitter with information about claiming your iPad Mini.

Follow Curious on Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter Party | Announcing Winner of the iPad Mini

Thanks again for participating in the Curious Twitter Party last night, we had a great time chatting with you! It’s wonderful to hear how many people are passionate about learning - from DIY-ing, to crafting, gardening, photography, and more! Check out some of our favorite tweets from the evening:

@curious A better way to learn ANYTHING!! Curious.com #iamcurious

— CammiLH (@cammi1972) May 23, 2013

@curious Thanks! The chat was fun and I can't wait to explore your site! #iamcurious

— Karen L. (@love2lovemykids) May 23, 2013

@curious Love it all, can't wait to let others know about curious.com #iamcurious

— Carolina Dhabolt (@cdhabolt) May 23, 2013

But now for the news! The winner of the iPad Mini is... Janis Brett Elspas ‏(@MommyBlogExpert) - congratulations! We'll email you with information about how to claim your prize. Congrats also to @2kidsandacoupon and @catherinepooler - winners of the $50 gift cards!

Happy learning!

Follow Curious on Facebook and Twitter.

Curious, meet world. World, meet Curious.

We are excited to officially launch Curious today! It’s been over a year in development, but we hope you’ll agree that it shows. Besides making Curious.com publicly available for the first time, we are also announcing the following:

• We are launching the Curious marketplace with more than 100 teachers who have already created over 500 lessons, in subjects ranging from calculus to wilderness survival to salsa dancing to pipe soldering. Over 200 lessons are completely free, with the others costing between $1 and $5.
• We are introducing Curious Coins as a currency you can use to purchase lessons on Curious. Each Coin is worth $1. For a limited time, all new members to Curious will get $20 of Curious Coins on us.
• We have raised over $7M from investors who agree that online learning is in need of a little sprucing up. So pull up a chair, we’re going to be here for a little while.
• Finally, due to popular demand, we are releasing (on a limited basis) a DIY version of our LessonBuilder. Teachers will be able to create, edit and manage their own Curious lessons entirely on their own. Apply here to become a Curious teacher.

We built Curious because we believe learning on the web should be much easier... and a whole lot more fun. And we can’t wait to see how teachers and learners around the globe end up using it. So you can understand our giddy excitement around the introduction of Curious to the world today.

Now that the two of you have met, we hope you will really hit it off.

Justin

Follow Curious on Facebook and Twitter.