Wordnik News & Reminders

Happy New Year, everyone! We wanted to give you a roundup of the latest Wordnik news and reminders about some of our fun features and products.

We rang in 2012 with a profile in The New York Times, Wordnik’s Online Dictionary, No Arbiters Please, while our President and CEO, Joe Hyrkin, was interviewed by IdeaMensch. Last month we launched the Wordnik-powered financial dictionary for SmartMoney.com of The Wall Street Journal (check out our blog post for more details).

Wordnik was highlighted in GigaOM’s NoSQL’s great, but bring your A game, while our special all-Glee edition of Word Soup, was featured at WetPaint.

Also, Wordnik is still hiring! Check out our jobs page for open positions and to apply.

To remind you, every weekend Erin McKean pens The Wall Street Journal feature, “The Week in Words,” a field guide to unusual words in that week’s WSJ issue. The latest installment rounds up 2011’s most interesting linguistic trends.

Did you get a Nook over the holidays? If so, you might be interested in their Word of the Day app, powered by Wordnik. And if your word nerd wishlist went unfulfilled, treat yourself to these Pocket Posh Word Power dictionaries.

Wordnik News: Swagger, Jobs, NoSQL Now

Here’s a roundup of the latest in Wordnik-related happenings.

Wordnik’s got Swagger. This week we released Swagger, a specification and complete framework implementation for describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful web services. The goal of Swagger is to enable client and documentation systems to update at the same pace as the server. The documentation of methods, parameters and models are tightly integrated into the server code, allowing APIs to always stay in sync. See the write-up on ReadWriteWeb for more information.

Jobs. Wordnik’s hiring! Check out the Jobs page for the latest openings. More to come!

NoSQL Now Conference. Our own Tony Tam will be speaking at the NoSQL Now Conference in San Jose on August 25, on the topic “What Drove Wordnik Non-Relational?” Sign up now!

Reminders. Remember that Erin McKean’s TED book, Aftercrimes, Geoslavery, and Thermogeddon: Thought-Provoking Words from a Lexicographer’s Notebook, is now available. Erin’s book takes a “revealing look at a torrent of new words and phrases—in science, politics, social life—that reveal our changing societies,” and is available on Amazon for the Kindle.  Also take a look at Erin’s latest Boston Globe column for more collectible words.

Finally, don’t forget about the Wordnik-powered weekend feature in The Wall Street Journal, “The Week in Words,” a field guide to unusual words in that week’s WSJ issue.  Here’s last week’s column and this week’s.

We’re Hiring: Head of Business Development

Wordnik is looking for a highly skilled, entrepreneurial Head of Business Development who is seeking a leadership role within a dynamic, growing organization. As an expert early stage partner in distribution deal creation and management, the Head of Business Development will lead Partnership efforts for Wordnik. With an understanding of content and information management the Head of Business Development will manage relationships with clients and partners including major publishers, content aggregators and distributors, content/text service providers, and post-PC application creators and devices.  In addition, the Head of Business Development will represent Wordnik externally at relevant conferences and events.

The successful candidate will have a background in partnership creation, contract negotiations, management, and experience in the platform, web, and hand-held device industry. The ideal candidate will be flexible, creative, self-motivated, trustworthy, authentic, and comfortable working in a flexible and rapidly changing environment.

Duties and Responsibilities

The Head of Business Development will perform the following and other duties as assigned:

  • Lead a regular strategic assessment of existing and potential BD partnership and product opportunities.
  • Implement strategic BD partnership opportunities.
  • Increase revenue by identifying, negotiating and managing external partnerships with revenue-generating opportunities.
  • Introduce new products and distribution partnership opportunities to the market and appropriate companies.
  • Support new product development, including product research, marketing, and pricing.
  • Promote an organizational culture and structure that fosters cooperation, communication, collaboration, teamwork, and trust.
  • Provide leadership, direction, and support for BD organization as it grows.
  • Meet and exceed goals and objectives.
  • Maintain active relationships within the industry in order to leverage appropriate market influencers and provide guidance on company positioning.
  • Provide executive leadership to the organization, giving input on company direction and organizational strategy as appropriate.

Desired Skills & Experience

The successful applicant will have the following minimum qualifications:

  • 5-10 years work experience with 2+ years in a management role and 5+ years in the content, platform, or SaaS industries startups.
  • Expert and inspired team-management skills, with past experience providing leadership to a dynamic organization.
  • A proven track record in Business Development and new partner generation.
  • Client-service orientation and superb client management skills.
  • Comfort representing the organization with executive-level management at multinational corporations and fast-growing new technology companies
  • Comfort with wearing many hats and shifting quickly between various responsibilities.
  • Excellent presentation, writing, and communication skills.
  • Comfort with regular travel to conferences and client sites.
  • Resourceful and inspirational attitude when interacting with both internal and external audiences.
  • High level of professional integrity.
  • Willingness to be flexible, adaptable, and proactive in a constantly changing industry.

About Wordnik

Wordnik’s proprietary language analysis technology combines linguistic and semantic algorithms to provide meaning and content discovery services for content creators, publishers, and aggregators.  Wordnik is backed by some of the leading investors in Silicon Valley, including Mohr Davidow Ventures, Floodgate, Baseline, SV Angels, Roger McNamee and over a dozen well-respected angel investors.

Wordnik is Hiring! Know Ruby on Rails?

help wanted

[image by, and licensed from, Sekimura]

We are seeking a Senior Ruby on Rails Developer to help build Wordnik.com and create Wordnik functionality to our partners and developer community for both desktop and mobile applications.

Wordnik builds and supports Wordnik.com as well as a public RESTful API which serves millions of requests a day. We run with noSQL databases, analyze data with Hadoop, and use a variety of programming languages including Java, Python, Ruby and Scala. Wordnik is an open source friendly environment and we encourage contributions to collaborative projects.

Required Experience:
* Strong development background with 3+ years Ruby experience
* Ability to conceive and develop modern and usable UI/UX designs.
* Familiarity with modern HTML/CSS design and frameworks.
* Strong JQuery experience
* Integration with REST services, external web services
* Ruby performance tuning

You’ll do even better with:
* Mobile device development (iOS or Android)
* Integration with Facebook Connect, oAuth
* Experience in a fast-paced startup environment

We’d love to see:
* your github account
* open source participation

We:
* Are doing something unique and meaningful
* Have interesting problems to solve
* Are backed by top-tier investors

More info:

The beginnings of Wordnik @ Erin McKean’s 2007 TED talk:

More about Wordnik’s noSQL initiatives.

Wordnik is an equal-opportunity employer and we are committed to diversity in hiring.

Interested? Email us at feedback@wordnik.com.