New year, new role and big news:
I am happy to announce today on my personal blog that I became Director of Marketing at iKnow!, the world's social learning platform this week.
iKnow! is run by Cerego, a technology company headquartered in Shibuya/Tokyo. Cerego has a 14-year old history of applying research in cognitive science and neuroscience to learning technologies (more info here).
iKnow! is Cerego's flagship product and even though the main focus was "only" the Japanese market for most of the time, iKnow! has attracted nearly 400,000 registered users since the launch in October 2007. The service won a Demogod award and was featured in TechCrunch (picked up by yours truly), Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and countless other international super blogs - don't even get me started in Japan ;).
Initially, Japanese users could use iKnow! to learn English but the service has dramatically expanded in the last few weeks: Now Polish people learn French on iKnow!, Russians study German and if you speak English, you can now learn Thai on iKnow! as well. All for free.
Users are welcome to create, share and remix content themselves and they do so like crazy: Almost 30,000 user-made lists (courses) are now on the platform, partially enriched with pictures, audio and video. iKnow! supports creating content in 191 different languages.
Before I get too excited over iKnow! in this posting, I suggest you try the service out for yourself (what a surprise, right?). Please feel free to add me as a friend.
You can find some more info on my position here and here.
PS
I am not leaving TechCrunch.
1/10/2009
I am now Director of Marketing of iKnow!, the world's social learning platform
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6 comments:
Awesome news Serkan... congratulations! iKnow is on to a winner, and now you are too!
cong, i am happy for u :)
Working for Techcrunch and working at a major tech company, uh, isn't that a MAJOR conflict of interest? It would be more ethical to resign your post at Techcrunch so readers know that a marketing executive isn't giving preferential treatment to certain companies. Wow, I would think your boss at Techcrunch would know this and demand that you choose one or the other. I would not trust the movie review person at the New York Times if he also held a marketing job at a major movie studio.
Congratulations. I use iknow to expand my Japanese vocabulary. Very happy with the service. However, already an idea to work on: the keitai application for Japanese learners is not completely operational: the words in kanji do not appear (only hiragana and English) and in the sentences the kanji appear allright, but not the furigana. I wrote Cerego about this a few weeks ago. They replied that the application for non-Japanese is still 'under-developed'. I hope this will soon change. Thanks and good luck with the new job.
Hi Vincent,
Thank you very much for using the keitai version.
We are constantly working on improving the handset application (no this is not a marketing phrase :)).
I will pass your comment on to the right people in the company.
Thank you,
Serkan
Serkan,I envy you. How do you manage your time as a blogger for Techncrunch, a Director of marketing for iKnow and a PhD student at Keio University? All these three positions are not simple at all.
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