The founders of an innovative Gainesville tutoring service will soon be promoting their product to colleges across the country, with the help of the $50,000 they’ve received as winners of the first Cade Prize for Innovation.
Matt Hintze, co-founder of Tutor Matching Service (TMS), says he and his partners are humbled to win the prize but plan to make the most of it. They will be supplementing the $50,000 with a substantial investment of their own to hire staff that can fine-tune and market their service, Hintze says. Their ultimate goal: to create an online learning system that can match students and tutors the way online dating sites match compatible couples.

“This allows us to go from the eBay of tutors to the eHarmony of education,” says Ethan Fieldman, another of TMS’s co-founders.
In capturing the Cade prize, TMS beat out more than 100 inventors, including three teams of high-tech and biotech finalists whose creations focused on such subjects as early cancer diagnosis, bio-friendly plastics and chemical-free water purification.

What made TMS stand out was its patent-pending tutoring process. The process determines how individuals learn—visually versus listening versus reading, for example—then matches each student with a tutor who can employ the best teaching technique to meet that student’s needs, Hintze explains. The company has developed an algorithm to monitor students’ performance as they’re tutored and the TMS application is housed on Facebook so it’s available worldwide. Down the road, Hintze, says, he can envision a completely interactive system, with students working through formulas on their iPads, for example, while tutors watch them through a web cam to make sure they’re getting every step right. 
Hintze says the time is ripe for innovative learning. Students in the U.S. are falling behind those in other countries, especially in the sciences. And both the federal government and states have put a spotlight on improving education.
“Education is an area of intense focus now. The opportunity to deliver a revolution in education is upon us,” he says.
Hintze and Fieldman are also partners in the local company Tutoring Zone, which provides group tutoring services to students at the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida. They are joined in TMS by Chad Corbitt, Ritesh Chaube, Rajiv Asnani, Malcolm Tyson and Jessica Bent.
In addition to the cash prize, which was provided with support from the Gainesville Community Foundation, TMS will receive office space and support for a year at the Gainesville Technology Enterprise Center, thanks to the Gainesville Area Chamber of Commerce.

Fieldman said the support at GTEC will help TMS take its product to the next level and get closer to its goal “to change the world.”
The Cade Innovation Prize is named for Dr. Robert Cade, the inventor of Gatorade. The prize was sponsored by the Cade Museum Foundation, which is also raising funds to build a museum of innovation and invention at Depot Park in Gainesville. “What we’re trying to do with this prize is be part of a team that supports these great inventors,” said Phoebe Cade Miles, who started the foundation. “No great inventor stands alone.”