Wordnik Creators Launch Reverb, A New Company Aimed At Connecting People With Meaningful, Relevant Content

January 22, 2013

Reverb to build new applications and services that surface a contextually relevant, comprehensive view of content around any given topic; FLOODGATE’s Mike Maples, Jr. joins Reverb Board of Directors

San Mateo, Calif. -- January 22, 2013 -- The creators of Wordnik, the world’s largest online dictionary, today announced that they have launched a new company, Reverb. Scaling up from Wordnik’s focus on individual words, Reverb’s mission is to connect people with larger pieces of meaningful content. Reverb was created to find and connect the rich associations between words, ideas, content, and people. Through its products, Reverb will enhance broader knowledge around favorite topics by surfacing interesting information readers might not uncover on their own. Building upon Wordnik’s core ‘word-powered’ technology, Reverb’s focus is on new applications and services for consumers, publishers, and developers. With its community of more than a hundred thousand word enthusiasts, Wordnik will continue to operate and grow as a stand-alone online dictionary and word-lovers’ community. The company also announced today that Mike Maples, Jr., managing partner at FLOODGATE, has joined the Reverb Board of Directors.

“The infrastructure that powers Wordnik is one of the technology industry’s most successful efforts. Capturing all the words in the world and providing people with a complete perspective on each word’s meaning involves an enormous technical foundation that isn’t limited to only an online dictionary application,” said Maples. “With the ability to leverage this proven technology in many diverse and compelling use cases, Reverb as a company is in a position to drive the future of content discovery, personalization, and engagement. Reverb will impact how people, publishers and application developers take advantage of the endless amount of online content available and how to expose that content as it contextually relates to personal interests.”

Introducing Reverb: The Company That Connects Words, Ideas, Content, and People

With its ‘word-powered’ technology built to understand the meaning of words and the associations between ideas, Reverb is focused on delivering the most relevant content – wherever a person is and whenever it’s needed – through a more personalized experience. Delivering products that help people engage more deeply with the information they uncover and choose to read, Reverb’s applications and services surface compelling content, directly and indirectly related to the topics you care most about. By optimizing ongoing engagement, Reverb will better understand each person uniquely and will ultimately provide discovery and reading experiences that are more personal, satisfying, and enjoyable.

“As a company, Reverb’s vision builds from Wordnik’s core competency centered on the meaning of a single word. We want to create an Internet that can associate ideas and the inter-relationships between concepts in a similar way to how the human mind naturally does,” said Tony Tam, CEO of Reverb. “We understand that the best content experience for people is one that’s meaningful and context-driven. Reverb is focused on building products to help consumers, publishers, and app developers uncover and connect to the most important and relevant information.”

Reverb for Consumers, Publishers and Developers
Developed by the company’s team of enterprise architecture, social networking, mobile, computational linguistics, and lexicography experts, Reverb’s products for consumers, publishers, and developers help people explore the topical information important to them and surface the latest and most relevant content delivered in engaging, friendly ways. Reverb products currently available include Reverb for Publishers, Reverb for Developers, and the Wordnik online dictionary. New consumer applications are in development and expected in 1H 2013.

Reverb for Publishers: Formerly named Related Content by Wordnik, Reverb for Publishers is the company’s first product developed under the Reverb brand. Launched in late 2012 as a beta release, Reverb announced today that Reverb for Publishers is now generally available. Reverb for Publishers is a content recommendation engine that identifies connections between related pieces of content and recommends the most relevant posts to readers. The product, using its proprietary algorithms, analyzes essential parts of a website page or blog post, including the tags, title, categories, and body. It then surfaces and displays related pages with similar content.

Reverb for Developers: As a company, Reverb is committed to the open-source community and proudly contributes infrastructure software to power applications and enterprises both small and gigantic. As an important part of its ongoing development plans, Reverb for Developers will continue to offer new releases and code contributions for the following:

  • The Wordnik API: an API that lets developers request definitions, example sentences, spelling suggestions, related words, phrases containing a given word, word auto-completion, random words, words of the day, and much more;
  • Swagger: an interface specification and complete framework implementation for describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful web services;
  • Atmosphere: a framework that simplifies building high-performance, asynchronous web applications with a mix of WebSocket, Comet, and RESTful behavior;
  • Scalatra: an open-source microweb framework that combines the power of the JVM with Scala and helps developers quickly build high performance websites and APIs.

Wordnik: Reverb’s flagship application, the Wordnik online dictionary will remain focused on being the friendliest and most contextually-relevant English dictionary in the world, with more than 7.5 million unique words, 240,255 comments, 187,318 tags, 121,591 pronunciations, 112,676 favorites, and 1,373,822 words in 37,322 lists created by 104,019 Wordniks.

About Reverb
Founded by the creators of Wordnik, the world’s largest online dictionary, Reverb connects people with the meaningful content that matters most to them. Reverb products find and connect the rich associations between words, ideas, content, and people. With applications and services for consumers, publishers, and developers, Reverb surfaces compelling content driven by relevant connections to the topics a person cares most about, providing reading experiences that are more personal, satisfying, and enjoyable. Built by a team of enterprise architecture, social networking, mobile web, computational linguistics, and lexicography experts, Reverb’s products include Reverb for Publishers, Reverb for Developers, and the Wordnik online dictionary and word-lovers’ community. For more information please visit helloreverb.com, or follow us on twitter at @Reverb.
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