SHOW HN: Take a look at my startup; Show off your vocabulary prowess

_sagacity · on March 23, 2011

Clickable:

http://vocabgenii.com

Edit: Added:

Congratulations on the launch and all the best.

Perhaps, we could think about a strategic alliance:

http://www.RapiDefs.com

tm65atcolumbia · on March 23, 2011

Thanks. Your UI is pretty awesome. Yeah we should talk. Tweet or shoot me an email!

revorad · on March 23, 2011

RapiDefs looks really good.

revorad · on March 23, 2011

This is quite well made. I enjoyed playing a few rounds. I did get the feeling that some of the word descriptions were written by non-native English speakers. There were some very small grammatical mistakes or strange combinations of words.

Regardless, quite a fun product. The hard part is going to be to stick in people's minds. Turning it into a Facebook game is one good way to achieve that, but you should probably keep thinking of more such things.

tm65atcolumbia · on March 23, 2011

Good point. Yes, more actions on Facebook are coming, stay tuned! =(G)

djb_hackernews · on March 23, 2011

I built something VERY similar (but not as slick) in 2009. It was a vocab game with scrabble like point scoring you played with friends via Twitter.

It basically just aggregated your twitter messages, and assigned points for uses of unused words within a "game".

I believe it's still "live" but since been decommissioned. http://www.playtwabble.com

tm65atcolumbia · on March 23, 2011

interesting

rotoscoped · on March 23, 2011

Neat. I played enough to get 10k. It is much too easy to do that because one earns so many points on the highest difficulty setting and the buttons can be mashed. I found myself having to do this several times because the obscured letter was correct or a spelling I was not familiar with. Have to say that I am not interested enough to pay...

tm65atcolumbia · on March 23, 2011

@michaeldhopkins Thanks for the feedback. The game does get easier for native English speakers. Believe it or not, we've seen many non English speaking users aren't even willing to mash the keyboard. It's an intentional no-punishment approach that we leave in the game, hoping that could at least be a ramp for English learners.

Regarding your opinion on paying, did you mean that the game being too easy is a key decision criteria?

rotoscoped · on March 23, 2011

It's not challenging enough for me, but more importantly I'm not convinced it's an effective way to increase vocabulary.

I should warn you I am probably not a normal customer: I enjoy reading the OED and I think the best way to improve in English is to learn Latin...so just take this as one data point.

tm65atcolumbia · on March 23, 2011

Outlier opinions are important! Thanks. Re Latin, the game today is a great tool to teach lexical structures, ie. prefix, suffix, word etymology in fact.

clojurerocks · on March 23, 2011

I was actually considering developing something like this myself. :-). Im a social entrepreneur with a focus on technology and like the education and game markets. Ill bookmark your site and try to follow the development.

atgm · on March 23, 2011

I tried to log in with facebook using the button on the front page and it popped up a blank white window that didn't do anything. Reloading the pop-up or the main window didn't change anything.

Opera 11.01, Windows Vista

tm65atcolumbia · on March 23, 2011

This might be a problem with Opera. Do you have another browser you could try? Sorry about that.

atgm · on March 23, 2011

Yeah, I'll try in Firefox when I have a chance. Thought I'd give it a whirl at work while I'm not so busy since we have a scheduled blackout tonight.

nithyad · on March 23, 2011

Hi James,

Congratulations on the public launch

tm65atcolumbia · on March 23, 2011

Thanks nithyad!