An ambitious educational site called Smart.fm has made inroads in Japan, and starting today it's setting its sights on the United States, with a revamped website and a new iPhone application.
Smart.fm's strong point has been teaching languages, but theoretically you could use its technology to create learning activities around any subject. Customers upload their structured data (basically, facts like what a Japanese word means in English), and Smart.fm generates appropriate questions around those facts. Smart.fm's Brain Speed Facebook app launched in September and offered a taste of what the technology can do by asking you questions based the information in your friends' profiles (i.e, "Where does Anthony live?" "Which of these is one of Anthony's favorite movies?").
This technology gives Smart.fm the potential to be broader than a traditional educational software company, because it doesn't have to write any content -- customers just upload the facts, and the questions are generated automatically. Other users can add new facts to the mix, too.
The company launched its learning service under the name iKnow at the DEMOfall conference in 2008, and says it now has more than 560,000 users in Japan. To make the site better-suited to a U.S. audience, chief executive Andrew Smith Lewis said it has been redesigned to be more fun and accessible. That change, he said, reflects the more serious "hardcore samurai learning spirit" in Japan compared to the United States, where education is a harder sell. For example, now the topics you can learn are called goals instead of lists, and can be gathered into sets. It should also be easier to upload individual facts into the system now too. And the company says you will soon be able to form groups, allowing people with common interests to compare their progress on various goals.
The iPhone app, meanwhile, allows users to log into the service and answer a few questions while they've got some free time. So you may not always find a solid stretch of time to work on your Chinese, but you can keep learning during the idle periods of your day, like when you're waiting for a meeting to start.
"You're 10 seconds away from actually learning something," Lewis said.
Cerego, the company that created Smart.fm, has raised around $20 million in funding.