Some Assembly Required? San Diego’s ShowUhow Uses Web-Based Video to Displace Printed Instruction Guide
Kim Folsom tells me that she tried using video for education in the late 1990s at Seminar Source, a venture-backed, Web-based software company in San Diego that tried to take advantage of the fact that it’s easier for many people to learn visually. “You could do video over the Web, but it wasn’t the best,” she says.
Years later, Folsom went to work as a vice president and general manager at DriveCam, the San Diego company that uses a video camera “event recorder” mounted on the windshields of delivery trucks and other fleet vehicles. The device helps fleet managers promote safety by identifying risky driving behaviors it records while staffers are behind the wheel.
These days Folsom is taking another swing at online video. She’s now the founding CEO of ShowUhow, a San Diego-based startup she founded in mid-2007 to create and host online video instruction guides that already are replacing printed instruction manuals. The video guides demonstrate how to assemble everything from Little Tikes’ riding toys and toddler furniture to consumer electronics from Radio Shack.
Kim T. Folsom
ShowUhow’s Web-based video instruction guides are far easier to follow and understand, she says, than printed assembly instructions that are written by too many people who don’t use the products, or whose directions leave too much open to interpretation.
“Newer smart phones and YouTube have helped make video adoption much more ubiquitous than it used to be,” Folsom says. With the iPhone, Folsom says users can find
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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