Memrise

You'd be forgiven for being wary of anyone who talks about gamification, with the term having become a buzzword for a lot of people whose main talent is, well, spouting buzzwords. But that doesn't apply to everyone.
Ed Cooke is a Grand Master of Memory – a title awarded to people who prove they can memorise 1,000 random digits in an hour; the order of 10 decks of cards in an hour; and one deck of cards in under two minutes.
His business partner Greg Detre has a PhD in neuroscience from Princeton. When the pair talk about "gamifying language learning", they're not messing about.
Their company is called Memrise, and it was the first UK startup to graduate from the Techstars Boston incubator, before going on to raise $1.1m of seed funding from some prominent US investors in February 2012.
"We're using crowd-sourcing, game-dynamics and lots of memory science to turn learning into a recreational sport," explains Cooke. "Technology should allow us to make learning massively more efficient and enjoyable."