BlikBook

» see blikbook.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I finished university in Turkey around the time four people in London were incorporating this, which puts me a couple of years and one country outside its catchment. BlikBook came out of a research project run between London Business School and UCL into how students actually engage with course material, and the founding irritation is specific enough to be believable: you are stuck on a lecture, there is no sane way to ask about it, and the question you eventually email to the lecturer is the same question forty other people in the room are sitting on.

The product was a question board, one per course. Students could post anonymously or with their names attached, to the lecturer or to the class. Lecturers could highlight a good answer and watch the participation figures. The feature that mattered most to a lecturer's week was duplicate detection, since one answered question stops the next thirty identical emails. The press reached for "Quora for higher education", which undersells how much of it was designed for the person at the front of the room.

It worked, and the adoption numbers were real. By October 2013 BlikBook was in use at more than a third of UK universities and at every university in Ireland, with endorsements on its own front page from UCL, Westminster Business School, NUI Galway and the University of East Anglia.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the Dublin move ~

In July 2013 BlikBook raised about a million euros in a round led by Leaf Investments, with Enterprise Ireland among the others, and in August it moved its head office from London to Dublin. The Irish papers covered it as a win for Dublin, which it was: a British company relocating because the investors and a chunk of the customer base were both Irish. Rene Olivieri, formerly CEO of Blackwell Publishing and COO of Wiley Blackwell, had joined as chairman back in 2011, which tells you plainly enough who the eventual buyer was expected to be.

~ the exit ~

Civitas Learning, an Austin company selling predictive analytics to American colleges, announced the acquisition on 21 July 2015 and made BlikBook its international base. Cheyne Tan went across as managing director of Civitas Learning International. The legal entity stopped being BlikBook Ltd on 4 September 2015, six weeks after the announcement. The product kept the name for another year, and for most of that year the site carried a one-line strip above its own marketing copy reading "BlikBook joins the Civitas Learning® family. Read more.", with every signup form underneath it still live.

Then it went, with no announcement anybody wrote down. On 5 and 6 August 2016 a crawler walked the whole thing and got a complete working product: lecturer signup, student signup, the case studies, an example class you could look inside. Pages were still answering on 9 August. By 11 September 2016 blikbook.com was a bare nginx redirect to civitaslearning.com, and it has pointed at the buyer ever since. The company itself outlived the product by eight years and was dissolved on 24 December 2024, which is the sort of date you only ever get off paperwork nobody is reading.

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