RapGenius just got a makeover.
After firing one of their co-founders, Mahbod Moghadam, for posting insensitive annotations to the manifesto of Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodgers, the company looked to get a new start. So, in going with the old saying "less is more," they removed a piece out of their name: Now, RapGenius is formally known as Rap "Genius."
Going with Genius is a smart move, so to speak, since dropping "rap" from their name broadens their target audience (imagine if Google was originally called "RapGoogle"), and the company has longed moved away from only annotating rap lyrics. As awkward as it has been for the past few months watching the co-founders push the formally known RapGenius as a "knowledge project," this rebranding of the company makes that idea a little easier to digest.
With the name change, the company secured a $40 million investment, and is introducing embeddable annotations, which debuted in an article on Business Insider:
They had already launched several channels — Rock Genius, News Genius, Poetry Genius — to test the idea, and they had made their technology embeddable so that annotated texts could be hosted on other sites in the same way YouTube videos are, vastly increasing the application’s reach.
And looks like this:
Check out the new site here at Genius.com.
[via Business Insider]
