Online Tutoring 24/7

(U-WIRE) It's the night before the algebra exam and half of the study guide is still confusing. The choice comes down to a good night's sleep or a good grade on the next day's test. At this point, it's one or the other.

Almost every student experiences a moment of panic like this during the college experience. Now, students have a source to turn to for help during these desperate times.

For the first time, students have a tutoring service that's available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's called uProdigy, and it's an online service that connects students with English-speaking tutors in South Asia. All of the tutors have Ph.D's or master's degrees, and some are professors.

The site launched after a Harvard graduate student proposed an executive summary plan for uProdigy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. From more than 100 entries, uProdigy was one of eight student-managed companies chosen as winners on Feb. 11.

Syed Adil Hussain, CEO of uProdigy, was inspired to create the company based on his experiences as a student. During his senior year at the University of Michigan, Hussain said it was too difficult and expensive to get help from qualified tutors for his advanced math courses. He said tutors with Ph.D's charged $60 to $70 an hour, a rate that definitely didn't fit into a college student's budget.

Hussain said he knew that there were tons of people with Ph.D's around the world and that people from anywhere could connect immediately through the Internet. He said he realized there was no reason why a student at the University of Michigan couldn't connect with someone in a different country and get significantly cheaper tutoring.

Hussain said about 25 percent of the site's customers need help in math, 20 percent need help in science and most others need help with essays and additional subjects.

The uProdigy site charges $15 an hour for live online tutoring sessions from a staff of more than 100 tutors. To attract new users, the company is offering the first hour of tutoring for free.

Students can communicate with their tutors through instant message, voice or even video chat sessions. If a student has a specific math problem that needs step-by-step explanation, or if an essay needs revision, he can send it in and receive feedback within the time frame he requests.

"We can help them in terms of the grammar, make comments, etc.," Hussain said about the process for essays. "We're definitely not a service that helps students cheat."

The $100K Entrepreneurship Competition has been held every year since 1990, and it is run by students for students. The goal of the event is to motivate students to take their talents and ideas and put them into action.

Winning the competition was an accomplishment that didn't come easily to Hussain or his teammates. The executive summary of uProdigy went through multiple rounds of judging on topics such as high growth potential, defensibility from competitors, up-front capital investment, short time-to-market, market leadership potential, stage of idea development, and quality and breadth of the team.

Finalists had to make a 15-minute presentation and demonstration of their plan. After speaking, they went through 10 minutes of answering questions from the judging panel. After all of the judges understood each plan, they deliberated and selected the winners.

Hershley Oge, a legal studies major, said if she needed help she would first contact the free tutoring services that UCF offers, such as the University Writing Center and the Math Lab. She said that if she couldn't find help there, or if she found herself in need of tutoring during non-business hours, she might consider using uProdigy.

"I personally wouldn't be interested in it because I don't get far behind in things," said UCF biology major RJ Cabrera. "But I could see someone who takes really advanced courses how they would want to use it."

Hussain said he is hopeful that once the word about his new business spreads, his tutoring service will become a popular choice among university students across the nation. To help spread the word, he is seeking to recruit one student from each major university throughout the country to market uProdigy to their fellow students.

"It would be a really exciting opportunity for an undergrad, especially someone who has an interest in marketing because they would get to sort of come up with their own marketing plan, strategize, and then execute their marketing plan," Hussain said.

The student chosen for this position would make a fraction of all profits uProdigy obtained from that student's university.

UProdigy online tutoring service is designed to make tutors more accessible to the average college undergraduate.

Syed Hussain, a graduate student at Harvard University, began the online program one and a half years ago. He started the program because of his personal experiences as a student, which made him realize the importance of tutors . Now he is on the other side of tutoring.

Hussain was an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, where he double majored in math and economics. When he enrolled in a class called advanced partial differential equations, Hussain found that he was embarking on what he said was an "absurdly tough class." Hussain and 20 of his classmates routinely spent 6-7 hours in the school library attempting to work and understand the practice problems.

When Hussain and the others did not understand a concept, they searched for professors, or students with a doctorate in mathamatics, for tutoring services. These tutors offered their help, but only at elevated prices of up to $80 per hour. Besides the steep price, Hussain said that the tutors were not always available when he needed help.

Aggie students can easily relate. With the multitude of tutoring services available in varying prices and quality, students have different opinions about which factor is more important. Michelle Dvorik, a senior business management major, used 4.0 & Go and Tutor John. "Even though [Tutor John] was more expensive, I liked the small classes they offered and was willing to pay for it," Dvorik said.

Other students are less willing to pay that extra amount.

"If the tutor was high priced, I would think that they thought they were better than they really are," sophomore agricultural communication and journalism major Casey Wessels said.

"I knew that college students needed some sort of on-demand service where they could come at any time to get help," Hussain said.

Hussain graduated in December 2004 and is studying philosophy of religion at Harvard. Meanwhile, he has initiated his own company, uProdigy.com, with 13 entrepreneurs.

UProdigy is an online tutoring service that offers tutors in math, some sciences, business, economics and essay writing. Students can log onto the site at any time and communicate with any of the 120 tutors by instant message or Skype ViOIP (voice chatting).

The tutors on the site have either a masters or doctorate in their respective areas, and many have teaching experience.

"All of our tutors are vigorously accepted. We subject them to three different interviews and a whole battery of online tests," Hussain said.

Hussain said he is looking for interns and college students are encouraged to apply. Interested applicants can find more information on the website.

UProdigy was launched Feb. 18 and has seen a quick growth of users. Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tested the service and found it to be very beneficial. On Feb. 11, MIT announced uProdigy as the winner of its prestigious business competition, the MIT $100K ESC.

In order to increase interest in the service, uProdigy offers one free hour of tutoring to all new users until the end of the semester. Any tutoring after the initial trial is $15 per hour.

"My main goal in offering this help was to solve the pain that I felt in undergrad," Hussain said. With the future prospects of uProdigy success, students may be assured that help will always be available for their toughest classes at the university level.

Boston University students looking for homework and studying help can now turn to a website that offers aid from tutors based in India, though BU officials warned of its potential drawbacks.

Syed Hussain, a Harvard University alumnus, launched Uprodigy.com, a website that offers help from business, math and science tutors in India for a low cost in November 2007, he said.

"A year and a half ago, when I was still an undergrad, I felt a need for this service myself," Hussain said. "I figured it would be helpful to students."

These tutors, who are available 24 hours a day, communicate with students via email and messenger services, Hussain said. He said every tutor employed by the site has a Ph.D. or master's degree, some teaching experience and fluency in English.

"We find really smart people in India and subject them to interviews and have them take many different tests to see what they are good in and how good their communication skills are in English," Hussain said.

Hussain said he is currently in the process of marketing the site, which is still in its early stages, to students.

To motivate students to use the site, Hussain said students can receive one hour of tutoring for free from now until the end of the semester. After the first hour, the service will cost $15 per hour.

Hussain said the best thing about Uprodigy is its ability to connect intelligent people, and said no one will be injured economically by his work.

"No one is going to be losing a job because of our website," Hussain said. "We're not reducing the demand for graduate student tutors. We are creating another market instead of taking one away."

Educational Resource Center Director Glenn Wrigley and Assistant Director Virginia Schaffer said although the ERC does not have an online service for students, the center offers students something better: the ability to connect with a tutor in person.

"Our mission here at the ERC is to develop a relationship between tutor and student," Schaffer said. "I don't want students to spend money on a tutor if they can't talk to him face-to-face."

Schaffer said she thinks Uprodigy would be useful for answering small, specific questions, but online chatting cannot offer the same clarity in-person tutoring does for questions with elaborate answers.

Wrigley said the variability between BU professors' teaching styles is a something the site is ill-quipped to handle because tutors in India cannot accommodate for stylistic differences without having taken the classes.

"A professor might stress points in which a tutor may glean over," Wrigley said. "[Online tutoring] opens the door to misunderstanding. It's not a problem of being from India. It's a problem of not being from BU."

Louisa Stelle, a College of Communication junior who studies with a Boston Language Center tutor, said she thinks Uprodigy would help for an immediate simple question, but it would be difficult for explaining certain concepts.

"It depends on the kind of course," Stelle said. "If you're in a general history class, it might help for the facts. But it is a great idea. If it's a way you can help students at a reasonable rate, then I think it will be a success."

It's 4:00 a.m., you've been up all night studying for the big linear algebra exam, and you have the sinking feeling that there's something about eigenvectors and eigenvalues that you still just don't understand. Your roommates are all asleep. You'd call up your friend the math whiz, who never sleeps, but you've already used up all of his patience. What do you do?

If anything like this ever happened to you in college (and it certainly did to me), the answer is probably "You get a C- on the exam." But uProdigy, a tutoring service launched publicly this week, has a way out that wasn't available when I was an undergrad: fire up Skype on your computer and talk live to a math teacher in India, who will explain everything you need to know about those pesky eigens for $15 an hour, charged to your Paypal or Google Checkout account.

UProdigy's service isn't the first live, Internet-based tutoring system (Washington, D.C.-based Smarthinking does that), and it isn't even the first one to use tutors who are based in India (Bangalore-based TutorVista does that). But it is definitely the cheapest, at least if you use it for 6 hours a month or less. (Smarthinking costs $35 per hour and TutorVista charges a flat $99.99 per month for unlimited hours.) And it's the only one started by a philosophy-of-religion graduate student from Harvard.

Actually, he's on leave for the semester. "There's just too much going on-the opportunity is just too big," says Syed Hussain, uProdigy's founder and CEO. "I can't justify sitting in class and learning about some obscure medieval philosophy when I could be out building this business."

When Hussain uses the word "obscure" he's not really serious-his focus in school is on Islamic studies, which he says is "not only an intellectual concern, but deals with a pressing problem nowadays, this existential tension between the Western and Islamic worlds, which is a problem that needs to be studied, especially by people in the West." But when he uses the words "building this business," he's very serious indeed. He's spent the last year and a half-since finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan-pursuing the idea of affordable online tutoring, and has assembled a distributed team of more than a dozen programmers and businesspeople, based out of office space that the company shares with several other startups in Cambridge's Porter Square. He says uProdigy represents an upwelling of his business instincts, which he briefly tried to submerge by choosing graduate school over a planned career in investment banking.

Here's his telling of the idea behind the business: "I was a double major in math and economics at Michigan and I was taking a class in advanced partial differential equations. The homework problems were ridiculously difficult, and all 20 of us in the class would show up in the library and work on the problems together. There were occasions when all of us collectively could not solve a problem, and in those instances we needed to hire a tutor.

"But it was difficult to find someone on campus who could help us with partial differential equations-only a PhD math student would have been able to help. And they weren't always available, and they charged $70 or $80 an hour. It was relatively cheap, when we all pooled our resources, to hire someone for three hours and pay them $240. But you can't afford that on your own when you're an undergraduate. That's when I conceived of this idea of having tutors on demand, 24 hours a day"-and for a reasonable price.

Hussain raised $130,000 in seed funding from a contact in the investment-banking business to start the company, and his team set out to recruit tutors by advertising around university towns in India. Applicants, who consist mostly of teachers and university professors looking for some extra work, are rigorously screened, and only 1 in 20 are accepted, Hussain says. They're then trained on using Skype and on the quirks of interacting with American college students. "For example, in India, pupils refer to their teachers as 'Sir' or 'Madam,' never by their first name," says Hussain. "Here, they do. It's a little different dynamic."

UProdigy tutors cover math, the sciences, economics, and English (including writing). Subjects such as American history are, understandably, less well represented (and Hussain says the company may eventually hire tutors in more countries, including the United States, to fill the gaps). UProdigy splits the $15 per hour fee with its tutors. Hussain wouldn't reveal how much of the fee the tutors keep, but he did say that at the going rate for tutoring in India, full-time tutors usually earn about $300 a month. "That comes to about $1.15 per hour," he says. "We pay our tutors significantly more than that."

UProdigy started beta testing last October, and went fully public on Monday, with ads in selected college newspapers around the country. The company hasn't hit the venture-capital trail yet-that will have to wait until after uProdigy has gotten its student clients through the spring semester, Hussain says. But the judges for the MIT Executive Summary Competition-the second of three phases in MIT's prestigious, year-long $100K Entrepreneurship Competition-thought enough of uProdigy's pitch to award it the $1,000 first prize on February 8. (Now Hussain and crew will go on to compete for the big $100,000 prize for the best student-submitted business plan, to be awarded in May.)

In the fall, says Hussain, the company will switch its users from Skype to another conferencing system that it can more easily enhance and upgrade. And many more technological advances in remote learning are coming down the pike, Hussain believes. "We're just seeing the beginning," he says. "I think over the next five years you're going to see a revolution in the way that humans interact with computers and therefore with each other. As we move away from interacting through a keyboard and a mouse and toward interacting with computers in a way that's more natural to us, I think more and more learning is going to go online."

The key to uProdigy's business plan, of course, is that it's using the Internet to bridge an inefficiency in the market-the disconnect between students who need academic assistance and the skilled educators they can afford to hire, who, in this case, happen to live ten-and-a-half time zones away. Obviously, there is quite a bit of sensitivity in this country over perceptions that highly skilled jobs once filled by U.S. workers are being "offshored" or taken over by educated but lower-paid workers in other countries, such as India and China. (In fact, my recent post on the scuffle between IBM and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative over an MTC economic report that indirectly suggested IBM was offshoring U.S. jobs prompted an outpouring of complaints from disgruntled IBM employees who say the company is doing just that.) But Hussain argues that uProdigy isn't engaged in offshoring, since it's offering a service (inexpensive off-hours tutoring) that isn't really available in the United States.

"No one is losing a job as result of this," he says. "Oftentimes there's nowhere for students to go at 4 in the morning. And students can't really afford tutors at $60 or $70 an hour anyway. This is going to enable students to get more tutoring and be competitive in math and science and writing." (About the writing part-Hussain says uProdigy went to India in part because the average academic there has a command of English to which most U.S. college students can only aspire.)

Meanwhile, if you're wondering about Hussain's own interrupted education, don't worry-he'll get back to it eventually. "I love learning about the philosophy of religion," he says. "My hope is that after four or five years of this, I'll be able to step back, hire a new CEO and go back to school."

College students can now receive tutoring from Ph.D.s anytime during the day or night, making late-night cramming just a little bit easier.

Harvard University graduate student Syed Adil Hussein and a few of his friends launched www.uProdigy.com last week after their business plan won a prestigious award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology worth $100,000.

Hussein said he and his associates surveyed 800 students to find how much they would pay for a round-the-clock tutoring service. The group ultimately decided on $15 per hour.

According to Hussein, he first came up with the idea for the site when he was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. He said people with Ph.D.s on campus would charge him and his classmates up to $80 per hour for more advanced topics.

"I felt the pain of the consumer," Hussein said.

Hussein added the tutors available on the site will mostly be in India and other Asian nations, which is what enables uProdigy to provide tutors late at night in the U.S. He said uProdigy has a "pretty extensive recruiting process," and advertises in many elite publications in India.

"We're going to make sure we always have a batch of tutors who will charge affordable rates," Hussein said.

He added it is important to provide choices for customers because the competition among tutors is "the only way you can ensure quality tutoring."

According to Hussein, all tutor candidates are put through a seven-step process to guarantee they are qualified to teach U.S. students. He said they must take a timed and randomly generated English grammar test that is impossible to cheat on. They are also interviewed and trained to understand the needs of American students.

Hussein said there are many things about the website that will be updated soon. He said the hourly rate may give way to a system that allows proven tutors to set their own rates. However, Hussein added there will always be enough competition on the site to ensure low prices because the company will be constantly recruiting and hiring new talent.

The site currently requires students to book a session 12 hours in advance, Hussein said, adding instantaneous, on-demand tutoring will be available by the fall semester.

University of Wisconsin freshman Brady Cavanaugh said he thinks the idea is a great one.

"A lot of people need tutors late at night because they don't start doing their homework until after midnight," Cavanaugh said.

UW sophomores Brenna McCabe and Wynne Moss, however, said the site would probably not be good for subjects that require more than typing and need a face-to-face interaction.

McCabe said she believed prices for in-person tutors at UW are comparable to the rate of the site. They both said they agreed the site would come in handy during cram sessions.

"I'd pay $15 an hour if it was a last-minute emergency," Moss said.

UW currently offers free tutoring for students through the Greater University Tutoring Service, a registered student organization that connects students with volunteer tutors.

GUTS is supported by segregated fees and provides assistance with academic courses, study skills, conversational English and intercultural exchange. Drop-in tutoring sections take place at either College Library or Steenbock Library.

Undergraduate students tackling tough subjects can receive tutoring from overseas for a small fee.

Syed Hussain, a Harvard graduate, said he came up with the idea of starting a Web-based global tutoring company when he had difficulty getting help from affordable tutors. He said tutors charged him $70 to $80 an hour.

"It wasn't always easy to get in touch with them, as well," Hussain said.

The start-up company, uProdigy.com, won the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology 100K Entrepreneurship Competition in the products and services category Feb. 8. Tutors must have a master's degree at a minimum and take a formal English grammar exam to teach through the Web site.

"The majority of our tutors right now are from India but we're also going to hire from other places, including the U.S.," Hussain said.

Hussain was born in Rochester, N.Y. His mother is from Pakistan and his father is from India.

"India stuck out in the beginning because you have this enormous pool of highly educated people," Hussain said.

Students can schedule their tutoring sessions in advance for an introductory price of $15 an hour. Tutors are available 24/7. Hussain said the interface is similar to AIM with VOIP.

Bernini Goitte, a junior in international business, was skeptical about speaking with tutors online.

"It depends on the class," she said.

Goitte is paying a tutor $40 an hour this quarter for help with Math 132. She prefers being able to interact with the tutor in person.

"I can't sit with him, work with him," she said of online tutors. "I don't think I would do that on the Internet."

Matthias Katzfuss, a graduate student in statistics, also said it depends on the subject. Katzfuss tutors undergraduate students for free in Cockins Hall.

He said the Mathematics and Statistics Learning Center always has volunteers.

Similar to Goitte, he was skeptical about student demand for the online service.

"If it's cheaper than face-to-face tutoring and as good (I would use it)," Katzfuss said.

"Usually, when you need tutoring you don't need it this moment," he said of free tutoring sessions provided by OSU.

Lesly Hernandez can be reached at hernandez.171@osu.edu.

Thanks to uProdigy, students have an alternative to the standard tutoring services offered on campus - they can now learn from Ph.D.s living more than 7,000 miles away.

The new service, the brainchild of Harvard grad student Syed Adil Hussain, provides 24-hour access to online tutors in South Asia and claims to be an affordable, convenient alternative to in-person tutoring.

"Usually when you want a tutor, you'll go to the math department and look for fliers on the walls," Hussain said. "You don't really know the tutor's qualifications or availability, and if you have a math test the next week, you're screwed. With uProdigy, all of the tutors have Ph.D.s or master's degrees, and they're available all the time."

Students can register on uProdigy's Web site and pay $15 an hour for live online tutoring, paper editing and homework help. Their questions are outsourced to India and Southeast Asia, where tutors must pass a series of standardized tests and interviews before working for the site.

Some faculty, however, remain a little wary.

"I see one big problem," said David Robinson, a professor of geology with a research interest in the Internet. "To what extent do these people know the course content? I don't think the actual medium is a problem, but I wonder about the knowledge base."

Jason Luther, Writing Center coordinator, also has concerns. He said editing services like uProdigy's Online Writing Lab can be valuable, but the learning process is more important.

"Our mission is not just getting an A on a paper," Luther said. "We work with the writer, not the writing. This service sounds like a once-over - what you lose is that one-to-one dialog."

Freshman Raymond Lapena and sophomore Caleb Sheldon echoed these concerns.

"I need to be physically one-on-one with [a tutor]," said Lapena, a public communications major. "There's a limited amount of information you can transfer on something like AIM - you can't just whip out a textbook."

Sheldon is an economics tutor but doubts uProdigy can help math students.

"It's so hard to explain an equation over the Internet," he said. "Plus $15 is really expensive."

Outsourcing has also become a controversial issue as more and more white-collar jobs move overseas. According to Robinson, tutoring services like uProdigy should consider hiring retired American professors who are more attuned to American curriculums.

Hussain disagrees, claiming that uProdigy has already proven itself a viable alternative to conventional tutoring.

"At enormous schools like Syracuse, tutors aren't always available. You have to make an appointment a week in advance, and then wait around for it," Hussain said. "If you're in upper-level classes, the work you need help with may be too advanced for your tutor. You also can never really be sure who you're getting. Those aren't things you have to worry about with uProdigy."

Currently uProdigy only offers tutoring in math, business and the hard sciences, but Hussain has plans to expand in the future. He was recognized by the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition, and the service has skyrocketed since its launch in October

Some students said they would be interested in uProdigy's services.

Nergish Sunavala, a junior broadcast journalism major, transferred to SU from India this year. She has attended two Indian universities - St. Xavier's and Jai Hind College - and said the uProdigy math and science tutors are probably of better quality than the ones at SU.

"If I needed math or science tutoring and I got an American tutor, I would run in the other direction," she said. "These [uProdigy] tutors probably know more than most tutors here. Math and science are just very big in Indian education."

At SU, the Writing Center will launch an online component in time for Summer Session 1 and will offer between 10 and 20 hours of writing help per week during the fall semester. While Luther said the Writing Center is not competing with services like uProdigy, he acknowledged the need to adapt to the Internet age.

"I'm sure we're going to hear more about this in the future," Robinson said. "We already have services like Turnitin and Google Books - why not put minds online?"

cedewey@syr.edu

A new online tutoring service aimed directly at college students and improving their studies, called uProdigy.com, launched last week.

Syed Adil Hussain, creator and chief executive officer of the Web site, said his service aims to offer "quality and affordable academic tutoring to students in need."

The Internet start-up was selected as the winning entry in the Product and Services category in the MIT 100k Entrepreneurship Contest in the fall. The award and prize money is given to a company whose business plans show high growth potential. The Web site was selected as the most likely to succeed from over 100 other entrants into the competition. Hussain, a Harvard graduate student, said he started the company because he "couldn't afford the high prices normally charged for help in higher level math and wanted to help others in my situation." So instead of charging normal private tutoring rates ranging from $60-$70 an hour in some cases, he offers sessions for a flat rate of $15 an hour, and students can be tutored in a vast number of subject areas.

While uProdigy.com began operating publicly last week, students from Boston-area colleges have been using the service since last October, and according to Hussain, "they've found it to be very effective."

"We've done a lot of research into what subjects that students need the most help in," Hussain said. Hussain said surveys showed 20 percent of students needed help in math, 20 percent needed hard sciences help, 15 percent needed help in essays and grammar and the rest needed help in the humanities.

The assistance available on uProdigy.com actually originates in South Asia, but Hussain said he is confident tutors are trained well enough to be as effective as any face-to-face tutoring session.

"All of our tutors go through a rigorous training process, with three interviews and a battery of standardized tests."

"We only accept about 5 percent of the tutors that apply," he said, adding that at the moment most of his employees are based in India. According to the Web site, all of the tutors employed have at least a master's degree and some have a Ph.D. and/or prior teaching experience. The Web site offers tutoring services 24 hours a day.

"If you wanted to schedule a session at 4 a.m. in the morning, you could certainly do that," Hussain said. "Just go to the Internet, type in our URL, and we'll connect you to someone right away."

Jennifer Foster, a fourth-year studio art student who's previously been tutored in Spanish, found the idea promising.

"Everything else is online, so why wouldn't something like this be too," Foster said.

Foster said she's experienced enough problems with free, campus-based tutoring to be willing to give uProdigy.com a try.

"Most of the students who come to do the tutoring on campus either don't show up or they're not very proficient in the subject or it only lasts for 30 minutes," Foster said.

Hussain said he understands missed appointments can happen with campus-based tutoring and he said that his tutors are professional and will be present for sessions.

"They'll definitely show up for tutoring appointments or they will be fired," he said.

Brandon Behun, a second-year business student who's never been tutored, also thought online tutoring was a good idea.

He said that uProdigy.com seemed to be the "most available and cheapest" alternative for students to look towards for tutoring help. "There seems to be a huge difference in their advertised rates and the costs of private tutoring," Behun said. Like Foster, he also said it was natural that tutoring be offered online.

"Everything seems to be branching out online now," Behun said.

Hussain said that although his product is new, he's excited to expand the services to include more subjects and add tutors from around the world.

"We're looking into having Harvard and MIT students give pre-recorded lectures and we want to have a base of 15-20 core topics in every single subject," Hussain said. "This semester we're also offering one hour of free tutoring to each student, with no credit card required to get started."

He said he's doing this to expand and ultimately improve the tutoring services and other products offered from uProdigy.com.

"We really want to get feedback from students to help us improve our service," he said.

UProdigy Inc. won the products and services category. Its CEO Syed Hussain is cautiously optimistic about the Cambridge company's chances in May. He said the company, which provides tutors in southern Asia to college students via chat and voice-over-Internet-protocol, has a strong team and stood out as the only winner not featuring new technology -- something he said could also work against it.