Tech start-ups focus on Hong Kong’s thriving education sector
A clutch of tutorial portals and a student accommodation site are cashing in
Education is a lucrative business in Hong Kong. As long as parents are happy to shell out large sums to enrol their children in tutorials or interest classes, and our school system continues to be exam-oriented, there is money to be made. And most of it is being made online.
A clutch of home-grown education startups has cropped up in recent years. Snapask, for instance, is an app that helps students with their homework. Set up by finance graduate Timothy Yu (who raised more than HK$10 million for this venture last year), the “tutor in your pocket” claims it could answer any academic questions within one to two minutes. For a monthly fee of HK$300, the 20,000 users can access its pool of 1,000 university tutors.
Similarly, Alastair Altham and his business partner Richard Howorth founded Tute.hk, an online tutorial service, last month. It allows parents to browse tutors’ profiles and book classes for their children over a computer. During a lesson students and tutors can communicate via a webcam and all the teaching is done online.
“We record all our lessons. If students want to have another go to better understand [some topics], they can play the lesson again. Parents can also listen to the lesson again to see whether their children are responding to tutors in the right way,” says Altham.