From such viral hits as I Can Has Cheezburger to helpful tools like Walk Score, hundreds of startup companies have their roots in Seattle’s thriving entrepreneurial community. This Q&A is the fifth in a series of interviews with Seattle-area startups.

Dave Schappell, Founder and CEO of TeachStreet

1.  What is TeachStreet?
TeachStreet helps people find classes–local or online–in hundreds of lifelong learning topics. Classes run the gamut from Spanish, piano, yoga and SEO to dog training, wine appreciation and more. If you want to learn it, we’ve got teachers and schools for you.

As a marketplace (like eBay), we help teachers and schools get more students by providing them with easy-to-use tools and services to promote their classes. We offer tools so that independent teachers can set up their classes and collect payment. And we also work with large nationwide class providers (such as Kaplan Test Prep) to generate student referrals.

Essentially, we built TeachStreet to create a place for people to explore their passions and help them enrich their lives through learning.

2.  What are some interesting classes offered on TeachStreet?
Go in and search for the craziest things you can think of, and I bet we’ll have classes for you. Poker? Cat training? Hammered dulcimer? Swordfighting? All our learning categories are listed here.

3.  How large is the TeachStreet community?
We don’t disclose actual member numbers (teacher or student counts), but the website’s been live since April 21, 2008, and in just the last month we’ve had more than 170,000 visitors from more than 170 countries. The great majority of visitors are from the United States, since our local classes are currently restricted to the U.S. But online classes (added late in 2009) are starting to attract students worldwide. Read more…

From such viral hits as I Can Has Cheezburger to helpful tools like Walk Score, hundreds of startup companies have their roots in Seattle’s thriving entrepreneurial community. This Q&A is the second in a series of interviews with Seattle-area startups.

Ksenia Oustiougova, Founder and CEO of Lilipip Studios

When was Lilipip founded?
The idea for Lililip originated in 2005, and we incorporated on paper in 2007. But the actual business didn’t really take shape until the summer of 2008. Read more…

In a report published this week, Microsoft looks at the causes of cyberchondria–the phenomenon of people concluding the worst after searching on their health concern on the Internet.

It’s not hard to see how cyberchondria came about. People have access to more medical information than ever before, but they also have to filter it. The report says that 8 out of 10 Americans have searched for health information online, but only 25 percent check the validity of the source or the publication date to see if it’s current. Read more…

How did you find out that Barack Obama was elected president? Were you watching the CNN coverage, with its freaky holograms? Were you surfing various news sites on the Internet, looking to see who would break the news first? Or perhaps you got the news from a friend’s status update on Facebook or Twitter. Read more…

InnoCentive is a crowdsourcing company that unites groups or companies with tough R & D challenges (“seekers”) with people interested in tackling them (“solvers”).

The challenges run the gamut from things like creating a fray-proof satin to potential medical breakthroughs like finding a biomarker for ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). The solvers are rewarded, sometimes handsomely. The ALS challenge has a $1 million reward, for instance. Read more…