Hi everyone!
For my venture pitch, I’m excited to introduce iPlusOne Glasses—a pair of smart glasses designed to support second language learners in a whole new way.
The glasses use eye-tracking to detect which words you pause on while reading authentic materials (like books, signs, menus). Based on your reading behavior, it figures out which words are just beyond your current level—what Krashen calls i+1—and sends those words to a connected app. The app then uses spaced repetition (thanks to Ebbinghaus!) to help you remember them over time.
It’s like learning without stopping, just read, and your glasses do the rest.
Elevator Pitch (1 min)
Full Venture Pitch:
Would love your thoughts and feedback! ????
Thanks for watching! ????
Hello Yan,
I find your concept both practical and compelling. During COVID, I worked on a project in Hong Kong that tracked which parts of videos were re-watched most, often indicating confusion or high interest.
We even analyzed re-watch patterns by timing, such as “X days before the exam,” and consistently found that the sections most replayed one day before the exam were students’ weakest areas. This insight helped us improve our teaching materials and approach.
Thanks for sharing, and wishing you success with iPlusOne!
Thanks for sharing that example, and it’s fascinating! I can see how tracking re-watch patterns could reveal so much about learner behaviour and needs. It’s a great parallel to what I’m trying to do with iPlusOne, just in a reading context instead of video.
Really appreciate the encouragement, and I’m glad my concept resonated with you!
REVIEW:
Thank you for your work and interesting venture, Yan Gao. It is an original solution and it is clear you have done your homework. Your understanding of the opportunity and your focused venture builds confidence and demonstrates familiarity and expertise; your sound research and succinct explanation of such a complex solution is impressive and captivating.
The sleek design of your venture pitch adds to its success, being professional and engaging. Your framing of the problem allows investors to glean over the pain points or examine each in more detail. The following solution page creates excitement for the product’s capacities, successfully framing the need for your product in the market and the opportunity it offers investors.
Your understanding of the market, use of market research, and honest framing of the competition is exceptional in that it communicates without distraction and builds upon the excitement from previous pages. Your business model is affordable, accessible, and scalable. In fact, it is helping me reflect on my own venture pitch – seeing where I could have made it much stronger.
The only criticism I might have offered was in getting to know you as the founder and your team. I had thought to mention that it could be done closer to the front end of your pitch, to establish your credibility right away. Now that I reflect on your overall pitch, leaving it toward the end is better. The effective structure and content establishes credibility with each page. By the time investors read about you, they have likely already made the decision to invest in your venture and are now free to solidify their decision by casually learning more about your background and your team.
Absolutely, I would recommend investing in this venture.
Hi Patrick,
Thanks so much for the kind words and thoughtful feedback! I’m really glad the pitch came across as engaging and well-researched, and that the problem/solution framing worked for you.
I appreciate your note about the founder section too. I went back and forth on where to put it, so it’s great to hear you think the current placement still builds credibility.
It’s awesome to hear my pitch gave you ideas for your own venture. Thank you!
REVIEW:
Great pitch Yan! I think this is such a compelling idea. The fact that you grounded your device in learning theory strengthened your pitch and showed confidence in the concept. I also appreciated how detailed your plan to bring a product like this to market was. Making language learning authentic and customized to the learner is a big challenge and I strongly agree with the idea that augmented reality technologies like iPlusOne Glasses are going to play an even bigger role in the near future. From an EVA standpoint, I would recommend investing in your product because your background and experience gives me confidence that this is a product that would be highly effective and therefore popular. As a bit of feedback, as an investor I would really want to understand whether I am investing in the software, hardware, or both. I can see how the software is different from competitors from your pitch, but I am uncertain about other companies who are developing smart glasses and where your glasses fit in that marketplace.
Hi Mark,
Thank you so much for your thoughtful and encouraging feedback! I’m really glad the grounding in learning theory came through, that was something I wanted to make sure supported the pitch from the start.
You raise a great point about clarifying what investors are funding. My vision is to develop iPlusOne as a bundled solution, with hardware and software designed to work seamlessly together.
Bundling both would allow me to control the full user experience, ensuring the eye-tracking hardware, AI algorithms, and learning features are perfectly aligned. In the future, the software could be potentially adapted to other AR devices, but initially, the bundle will be the core product and brand identity.
Thanks again for highlighting this point. I’ll make sure to make it much clearer in my pitch so potential investors immediately understand the scope of the venture.
Interesting venture and great pitch, Yan Gao! I see how iPlusOne Glasses present a unique blend of eye-tracking technology, based on Krashen’s i+1 language acquisition theory to support ESL/ELL learners in various reading contexts. Your product’s market potential is quite promising, and the staged rollout from MVP to institutional pilots is particularly thoughtful, especially for institutions seeking innovative EdTech tool. I believe your solid technical roadmap, strong pedagogical foundation, and potential for institutional integration are clear strengths. The main risks of this venture lie in hardware or software development cost and ensuring the accuracy of the eye-tracking technology. I would definitely invest in this project, as I see a solid potential for impact in the academic sphere.
10/10 Elevator pitch Yan! I love how you combined voice-over with AI video and real photos to craft a compelling story. It is really cool how you have combined so many of the concepts we’ve discussed in this course into a venture: wearables, AI, and adaptive learning. Your expertise in SLA and your integration of sound pedagogy serves to enhance your credibility as a founder and significantly strengthen the value of your pitch.
You also do an excellent job of differentiating your product. At a glance, it looks like a wearable translator, but leveraging the eye-tracking for difficult word identification is really clever. While you’ve identified a number of competitors in the language learning market, the closest potential competitor in the wearables market might be RayNeo, (https://www.rayneo.com/en-ca/products/tcl-rayneo-x2), which provide muchmore extensive AR glasses functionality along with live translation. I think a potential risk of iPlusOne is that a more established manufacturer such as RayNeo opts to integrate your language learning concepts and co-opts your potential customer-base. Given your price offerings and niche market, it may only be a minor concern.
I would absolutely invest.
This was a Review.
FEEDBACK:
Hi Yan,
Great work on your venture! I think the iPlusOne glasses have the potential to be used in classrooms to support second-language learners around the world. The concept of smart glasses for second-language learning is innovative and fits in with emerging wearable tech trends that we covered through the various OERs this semester. However, I would be interested to know how your product integrates with existing learning systems and whether the hardware is cost-effective or scalable. Can iPlusOne be used with paper-based reading materials as well? Otherwise, great work on your venture and I would consider investing in it if I were an investor!
Hi Yan, I love
I love how you went deep down the rapid hole to justify the significance of iPlusOne glasses. It is important when founders understand the technicality or educational usability behind the product, because it shows how much understanding and trust you have for the product to succeed. I think to bring this product to life would require extensive R&D cost, so I hope you can keep on building the idea with a team of specialties, and navigate through getting the license and IPs! (I think as an investor I would be most interested in the IP; as a parent I would want to know how effectively this product is going to help my children’s learning outcome; and as a student I would be keen on using this product to support self studying)
Very interesting idea!
(Btw, if you have time would you mind checking out my venture as well? Would appreciate any comments and suggestions – https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec522/2025/08/04/creaba-studio-building-the-future-of-education-content-creation/)
REVIEW
Hello Yan,
This was a really compelling pitch from start to finish and as I went through, many of my initial questions were answered one by one, which tells me that you’ve really taken some time to think this venture through. Well done!
I love the description of how the glasses work, but I do wonder about the level of complexity involved in building the necessary hardware and software to pull it off. Are there other examples of eye-tracking software out there that have proven to be successful, scalable, and embraced by the market? If so, are there any key lessons you could learn from them? If not, what is the biggest hurdle you anticipate in the creation of this tech?
For your B2B customers I would recommend adding School Districts in any large urban area, especially in Canada, because this is where you will find opportunities for multi-school adoptions of this tech to support their ESL/ELL initiatives. Vancouver and the Greater Toronto Area would be especially good places to look for pilot opportunities during your first year of pilot testing. I think your idea to develop an AI powered reading tutor would also be an excellent evolution of this product for the K-12 space but with a 3 year timeline you may find that some companies (Amira would be an example) might have a significant head start in this rapidly developing space.
Overall, this is a great use of a variety of emerging technologies and it solves a really common and salient problem so I would absolutely invest in this. Great job!
FEEDBACK
Hi Yan,
This is a smart and ingenious way of pairing AI technology with wearable technology! I also appreciate the thoughtful incorporation of the neuroscience behind spaced repetition into the development of 1plusone. Before committing to investing, I think I would need to see more research into, or a proof of concept of, how different types of eye movements relate to comprehension.