smart.fm

» see smart.fm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Cerego Japan opened the beta in October 2007 and called it iKnow!. It was Japanese-only and it did one job, which was teaching English to Japanese speakers, and the thing that made it worth using was underneath: a spaced repetition engine built on cognitive science research rather than on a flashcard metaphor. The site decided when to show you a word again, and it decided badly on purpose, catching you just before you forgot. Cerego itself had been working on the idea since 2000.

The interesting decision came a year later. On 24 November 2008 the platform opened to another 188 languages, and on 5 March 2009 it stopped being iKnow! and became smart.fm. The rename carried a real change with it. The scheduling engine no longer cared whether the thing you were memorizing was English vocabulary or the capitals of Europe, so the site let anyone build a list of facts about anything and drill it, then share the list. Learners arrived to study Japanese from English, which was the reverse of what it had been built for, and it worked anyway.

Money never arrived in the same quantity as users. Cerego had raised $23.4 million by September 2009, the last round being $3.4 million from NTT DoCoMo, and the product it was spending that on was free at the point of use. On 27 January 2011 the company announced the end. Registrations closed the same day. The service ran until 31 March and then handed its audience to iKnow.jp, a paid subscription at 1,000 yen a month, which is about six dollars at the rates of the time.

It was a Japanese product with a global window of roughly two years, and the reason it existed was English for Japanese speakers. My English came out of being online from 1998 onward and never out of a drill, so there was nothing this could have sold me. What I would have wanted was the engine, and the engine is the part that survived.

~ the record ~

~ what the paywall did not carry ~

The complaint from users was not really about being asked to pay. It was that the paid site was smaller than the free one. Everything the community had built, the shared lists and the user-made courses, did not make the trip, and the replacement launched without the tools that had produced them in the first place. One learner writing it up that April had 86 hours logged against 1,580 kanji and finished the goal days before the site closed under them.

Cerego had nine weeks between the notice and the cutover to make the new site worth the money, and it went live visibly unfinished. That is how a paywall turns into a grievance instead of a price.

~ where the engine went ~

Cerego the company did not die. It moved to San Francisco and sold the same memory-scheduling technology to universities and corporate training departments, which is where that kind of software has always made its money. The Japanese consumer side stayed in Japan and stayed called iKnow!, and it is alive today at iknow.jp under DMM, sold as English study for Japanese learners. The product came back to exactly the market it started in.

~ the address now ~

The domain still resolves. It points at servers in Tokyo and hands you to iknow.jp, so it never lapsed and no squatter ever got it. Read the source of the page it sends you to and the dead name is still there, sitting in the meta keywords beside "TOEIC" and "iPhone": smartfm, smart.fm. Fifteen years after the shutdown, the brand exists as two search terms someone never got around to deleting.

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