Cerego Labs: A New Platform For Building Better Learning Apps

We’ve seen a lot of innovation in the education technology space lately, but we haven’t seen many new learning platforms that give developers the tools to build their own apps yet. With Cerego Labs, though, developers can now access a platform that, as the company itself puts it, is somewhat akin to a “Heroku of learning.” What’s interesting here is that Cerego Labs offers both an API for developers who want to incorporate the service into their own apps, as well as an easy to use editor that non-technical users can implement to build their own learning apps without the need to touch any code.

The platform is now in beta and developers can sign up here. Invites will come in waves and the company expects that the service will become generally available in the Fall.

Cerego uses a “spaced rehearsal” approach that’s been shown to enhance factual learning by regularly circling back to items that users learned in previous sessions. When users don’t get a question right, the software repeats it more frequently and questions that were answered right will still be repeated, but not as frequently. This technique is probably most often used in the context of learning new vocabulary, but it can obviously be used in virtually any context where a learner has to acquire and remember a new set of items. In the end, the idea here is to help learners acquire a new set of knowledge faster and remember it longer.

The idea behind launching Cerego Labs, says the company, is to “enable a new ecosystem of smarter learning applications that meet the World’s fast-evolving learning needs, targeting high-value verticals like finance, law and medicine.”

The company itself, by the way, isn’t actually new. Cerego is based in Japan, where it has 35 employees. Until now, though, the Cerego team has mostly focused on the Asian market under the iKnow.jp brand. It’s only now, though, that the company is making a push for the U.S. market, with plans to expand its service to languages like Spanish, Chinese and Portuguese in the near future.

If you want to give it a try yourself, Cerego offers a number of demos here (and if you want to brush up on your knowledge of Silicon Valley luminaries, here is another good demo).