Memrise
| Memrise Logo.jpg | |
| Type of site | Privately held company |
|---|---|
| Registration | Optional |
| Available language(s) | Mandarin Chinese, English, French, German, Spanish, and many more (the entire list can be seen here). |
| Launched | September 2010 |
Memrise is an online learning tool that uses flashcards augmented with mnemonics—partly gathered through crowdsourcing—and the spacing effect to boost the speed and ease of learning.
Memrise was founded by Ed Cooke, a Grand Master of Memory, and Greg Detre, a Princeton neuroscientist specializing in the science of memory and forgetting.
Memrise launched in private beta after winning the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club 2009 TigerLaunch competition.[1]
In July 2010 Memrise was named as one of the winners of the London Mini-Seedcamp competition.[2] In November 2010 Memrise was named as one of the finalists for the 2010 TechCrunch Europas Start-up of the Year.[3] In March 2011, Memrise was selected as one of the Techstars Boston startups.[4]
In late September 2012 the leaderboard on the website was suspended due to "extensive cheating" on the website. The cheating users were found to have been using bots and other loopholes such as using celebrity photo memory courses, to score many more points than possible when using the learning system honestly. The website has a message now that there will be a new leaderboard system set up soon.
On October 1, 2012, 100 users were allowed to sign up to test a non beta version of the website called Memrise 1.0.
Press
In 2011, Memrise was reviewed by AOL's Daily Finance,[5] the MIT Technology Review,[6] MSNBC[7] and Gizmodo.[8]
References
- ^ "Princeton Entrepreneurship Club 2009 TigerLaunch winners"'
- ^ http://seedcamp.com/pages/mini_seedcamps10 Mini Seedcamp Winners
- ^ http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/11/17/the-europas-the-finalists/ Techcrunch Europas finalists
- ^ http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2011/03/techstars_boston_2011_who_got.html
- ^ Alex Salkever, "Look Out, Rosetta Stone: Memrise Has a New Vision for Learning Languages", Daily Finance, February 25, 2011
- ^ http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=37874
- ^ http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/23/6927106-grow-a-new-language-in-your-head
- ^ http://gizmodo.com/5815059/memrise-is-a-viva-pinata-for-language-students
