Two Austin companies have created a strategic alliance with each other today. Mindbites has launched a new education category, and Thinkwell will provide the content. Mindbites launched in March of this year, competing with some well-funded companies in the hot video instruction space. ThinkWell features an extensive library of more than 2500 professionally created video tutorials featuring top university lecturers.

If you’re not familiar with MindBites, they offer a variety of short video tutorials for iTunes style prices. If you’re a fan of Austin-based author Thom Singer, you can check out his video on the subject of how to give a last-minute toast or speech. Excerpted math help videos from Thinkwell’s College Algebra and Calculus courses, taught by Professor Edward Burger, will be available for purchase for $1.99. Once purchased, users can watch the videos repeatedly online and download versions to view on their laptop or mobile device.

“The MindBites Education category is a natural way for parents, homeschoolers and students to access high-quality instructional support quickly and cost efficiently,” says MindBites Founder and CEO Jason Reneau. “It also provides educational publishing companies with an additional channel through which they can make their instructional content available, and the more than 7 million teachers and tutors in the U.S. alone with an opportunity to easily publish and profit from their own instructional abilities.”

With many playeres in this space, we took at look at some traffic numbers from compete.com. You can see that Austin-based ExpertVillage.com (acquired by Demand Media) is the leader in the instructional video category.

But if you look at the bigger online how-to segment, about.com and ehow.com dominate web traffic.

It’s a big market out there, and it’s great to see MindBites continue to gain traction.

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