An attempt to be the world’s largest video dictionary: the Mocept story

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world - Nelson Mandela

Unlike many, Gomathi Sankar wanted to be a teacher when he was still in school. He was always thinking about how to how learning could be simplified and made interesting for everyone. During his engineering days in IIT Kanpur, his quest grew, and soon he became the go-to guy for his batch mates and juniors to demystify concepts and theories. To no one’s surprise, after 18 years of cutting-edge tech work, he is now an entrepreneur in a venture attempting to redefine the way we learn.

Gomathi is the Founder of Mocept, a tech platform that provides unique learning experiences on mobile devices through animated videos.

The first product from Mocept is called Illustrate, which is an animated video dictionary that has close to 20,000 words brought out in a contextually relevant video format using actual conversations to demonstrate usage and meaning. Gomathi says,

Whatever your subject of interest, it is important to understand words. And contextual relevance of words becomes increasingly powerful if you are a young learner. For example, even if you are doing engineering or preparing for SAT, the vocabulary used has to be understood in context.

For a young adult who is learning most of the words for the first time, a simple one line explanation of the word may not be the most effective way to understand its meaning. Moreover, using dictionaries is a dry way of teaching. Dictionaries really haven’t changed much over the last 100 years and should be ousted. Our videos present the words in simple explanatory form through animation. It is engaging, crisp with an element of entertainment, adds Gomathi.

And why not? As the famous saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Surely then, a video is worth a million. Eyeing the 50 billion dollar e-learning and language learning market, Mocept is gearing up to reach every possible young learner from across the globe. “We are looking at a global market with presence in Latin America, Asia, the US and others. Soon this video dictionary app will roll out special products for SAT, GRE, GMAT and other tailor-made products for local markets.

Having raised some initial angel money, this Bangalore-based startup is passionately chasing big dreams. “One question that drives us is, can we crack the learning model, and in the process make meaningful education available to everyone across the globe? With so much advancement in technology, it’s time to concentrate on it to bring real, tangible change.” This drive is backed by a strong technology that Mocept has developed in-house. They have a proprietary model to build scalable animation products.

“Illustrate app is just the start; we will be building learning apps in multiple domains and wherever we see a need to make a significant impact in the users life,” says Gomathi with enthusiasm. Why don’t you check out the Illustrate app and see how it makes word-learning fun for you? It is available for iOS currently and will be available in Google Play Store later this month.

You can download the Mocept iOS app here.