Memrise

Memrise
Type of site
 Privately held company
Available in Mandarin Chinese, English, French, German, Spanish, and many more.
Founded US (2005)
Area served Worldwide
Founder(s) Greg Detre, Ed Cooke
CEO Ed Cooke
Slogan(s) Learning, made joyful.
Website memrise.com
Alexa rank 9,330
Registration Yes
Launched September 2010

Memrise is an online learning tool with courses created by its community. Its courses are mainly used to teach languages, but are also used for other academic and nonacademic subjects (such as trivia, video game trivia, and pop cultural). Memrise uses flashcards augmented with mnemonics (known within the service as "mems")—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 is possible when using the learning system honestly. The website has since put up a new leaderboard.[5]

On October 1, 2012, 100 users were allowed to sign up to test a non-beta version of the website called Memrise 1.0.

As of May 2013, a Memrise app has been available for download on both the App Store (iOS) and Google Play.[6]

In November 2014, Memrise created the Memrise Prize in partnership with the University College London. The Memrise Prize challenges people to create the most powerful method for memorizing new information. The award is a prize of $10,000 and a feature in an article shared and co-authored with the scientific and business community.[7]

Press

In 2011, Memrise was reviewed by AOL's Daily Finance,[8] the MIT Technology Review,[9] MSNBC[10] and Gizmodo.[11]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "TigerLaunch 2009". princetoneclub.com. Archived from the original on December 23, 2011.
  2. ↑ "Mini Seedcamps 2010". seedcamp.com. Archived from the original on June 9, 2011.
  3. ↑ "The Europas – The Finalists". TechCrunch. AOL. Retrieved 20 January 2015.
  4. ↑ "TechStars Boston 2011: Who Got In". Boston.com. Retrieved 20 January 2015.
  5. ↑ "The irrationality of cheating at gamified learning". Wired UK.
  6. ↑ "Forums > What's New: May 20th News! - Memrise". Memrise. Retrieved 20 January 2015.
  7. ↑ Memrise (13 November 2014). "Memrise, University College London Launch the First Annual 'Memrise Prize' Competition With $10,000... -- LONDON, November 13, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --". prnewswire.com.
  8. ↑ Alex Salkever. "Look Out, Rosetta Stone: Memrise Has a New Vision for Learning Languages". DailyFinance.com. Retrieved 20 January 2015.
  9. ↑ "Plant a new language in your mind". Technology Review. 23 Jun 2011. Retrieved 5 November 2013.
  10. ↑ "Grow a new language in your head". NBC News. 20 January 2015. Retrieved 20 January 2015.
  11. ↑ "Memrise Is a Viva Pinata For Language Students". Gizmodo. Gawker Media. Retrieved 20 January 2015.
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