Memrise is a learning platform with more than half a million users, backed by people from Zynga, Wordpress, and Facebook. Ed Cooke, co-founder and CEO, told the story of how Memrise began as a student project, the steps it took to build its first product, how it gained traction and funding, and its plans for the future.
In his lecture, he talked about how the biggest problem you have to overcome in building a business (having no idea what you're doing) is part of the fun, and about how the best way of creating ideas for businesses is to solve problems you and your friends have.
Ed Cooke
Co-Founder, CEO memrise.com
Ed Cooke co-founded Memrise in 2010 with the aim to make learning genuinely pleasurable. He leads product vision and invention. Previously, he wrote a book, was a columnist for the Times, became a Grandmaster of Memory and trained Josh Foer to be US memory champion in a year. He holds degrees in Cognitive Science and Philosophy from Oxford and René Descartes Univsersities, Paris.
Bringing words to life
Memrise opened up its API, and the hackathon challenge was to create the most interesting little learning game in the time available.
It was not necessary to use the API, participants could invent something from scratch.
The goal of the hack, though, was to bring words to life.
The prize for awesome hacks wass a summer internship in London at Memrise HQ!
pro_noun_she_ace_on - Winner team!
Ilias / Anastasis
The target of the application is to teach Greek words to foreigns, based on the way the Greek words sound, and associating them with English words.
The main algorithm is divided in 2 parts:
1. Convert the Greek word into a form using the latin letters and can be pronounced as correctly as possible.
2. Finding English words based on a dictionary, that sound like the converted Greek word.
The implementation is based on Ruby1.9, PHP, JS and jQuery library.
Project's website
Augmented Reality
Kostas
The basic idea was to use Augmented Reality in order to visualise memory thoughts, and make connections between images and relative content. Using iOS and Metaio SDK, the user is trying to learn the capitals of Scandinabian Countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland).
Project's website
Learn Greek!
Alexis / Antonis
Alexis and Antonis gathered all most frequently used and useful greek expressions, and tried to present them in a fun, entertaining way. Using HTML5 and CSS3 technologies, the team managed to create a very positive user experience, that enhaces the learning capabilities of the user.
Project's website
MemRiseGame
Stergios
Stergios wanted us to use our imagination and find the similar word to the word given. When a word appears, you must choose the correct image out of 4 given images. The association is based on the sound of the word. For instance, god goes with dog.
Project's website
Twitter Analysis
Maria / Despoina
Maria and Despoina examined the possibility of automatically acquiring crowdsourced information about certain terms using the Twitter platform, to extract relevant mems (in Memrise, mems stand for anything the can help people learn a new connection between a word and its meaning).
Project's website
