This article was published on October 31, 2012

HowDo lets people share everyday knowledge, lands seed funding from Wellington Partners and Horizons


HowDo lets people share everyday knowledge, lands seed funding from Wellington Partners and Horizons

A fledgling European company called HowDo is today debuting a social mobile platform for capturing and sharing everyday knowledge and real-world skills (think: how to peel a banana, or how to dry your socks super quickly).

In addition, the startup is today announcing that it has raised a ‘significant amount’ of seed funding from Wellington Partners and Horizons Ventures, the investment firm owned by billionaire business magnate Li Ka-shing that has invested in companies like Spotify, Facebook and Siri.

Another backer is angel investor Peter Read.

HowDo is registered in the United Kingdom under the awesome name ‘How Do You Peel a Banana? Ltd.’ and is currently moving its base of operations from Stockholm, Sweden, to Berlin, Germany.

What’s interesting about its iOS app – the service is only available on Apple devices for starters – is that is uses only sound and image to capture and compound real-world, everyday knowledge, in chapters.

Not unlike Snapguide, HowDo wants to encourage people to share the little tricks they know that make their daily lives a bit easier, or skills they’ve picked up along the way that they think can be useful to others.

So far, the app has been beta-tested by about 450 people, who I’m told are particularly fond of learning new things through the ‘Discovery’ section of the app and checking out which guides are shared and ‘loved’ the most.

The making of HowDo guides is done entirely from an iOS device, although the content can obviously also be viewed on the Web by people who don’t have the app. It’s also worth noting that guides can be tagged with location, which I guess can be useful information for some of them (i.e. “the best way to navigate a certain subway station in a city”).

Evidently, they can easily be shared with others on a variety of social networks.

Asked whether Android support is on the roadmap, HowDo co-founder Nils Westerlund told me that they want to build the best possible product for iOS first without having to worry about replicating the user experience on any other platform. Which, as I understand, means they’re going to be focusing on iOS only for the time being.

HowDo for iOS

Image credit: FAYEZ NURELDINE for AFP / Getty Images

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