Over the past few days, I have been trying out Babbel to learn French. They have obviously iterated over their interactive courses to come up with an incredibly nice solution (and the speech recognition is just the icing on the cake). I have been telling about this to anyone whom I can. And, that has resulted in some great conversations, especially with some people who have traveled around the world.
Some of you might remember my blog post on “Why I will finally buy an iPhone”. The truth is, I did not – and I won’t.
Of course, one of the reasons was Antennagate although I would not use the iPhone for making calls that much anyway. But nevertheless, a not 100% working device for 100% of the price isn’t interesting to me.
The other reason: they delayed the white iPhone 4. Therefore, I bought an iPod Touch and until yesterday, I was really happy with it.
Busuu, the language learning community, just launched its seventh language: Russian.
This not only enables the already signed up community members to learn a new language but, maybe even more important, it opens Busuu a whole new market for its service as the entire platforms is from now on also available in a localized Russian version.
Udemy, the Academy of You raised a one million USD seed round led by a line up of well-known Angels and Seed Funds. After the recent launch of Udemy Academic this is the second big news from this energetic young startup.
I had the chance to interview Gagan Biyani on Sunday for EDUKWEST being one of the first to officially share the news. Below you will find an excerpt of our talk and at the end of this post you can find the link to the entire interview in which Gagan explains how they were able to raise this round.
Last week I had a very interesting talk with Matthias Spanic, the new CEO of Palabea. There has been a radical change of the board and the new team is currently working on a complete reboot of the community.
All of the three executives have an impressive track record in the German startup scene and after our first talk I believe that the platform could actually make a turn around.
Yesterday Mashable and ReadWriteWeb published an interesting study of Pew Internet that shows the group aged 55-64 grew by 88% and aged 65 and above even grew 100% in the use of social networks.
What does this mean for online education? Good times, as this is a great customer group to target.
Last week Sparkeo launched a revamped homepage, a brand new player and – drum roll – an affiliate program. This is a feature I have been really waiting for.
I am a firm believer of spreading quality educational content through affiliate systems and it was one key feature I recommended Frederic Aknin to implement in his platform, hence I am particularly excited to see the launch.
Today’s #followfriday goes to a person, or should I say personality?
I am following Arnold Waldstein’s tweets and blog for about two weeks now only but I can’t imagine how I could have lived without his tweets. [/pathos]
Joking aside, Arnold Waldstein is hands down one of the most interesting people I met on Twitter so far.
I just learned about a very interesting blog post of Leo Laporte in which he says
Social media, I gave you the best years of my life, but never again. I know where I am wanted.
I think, he is right and deep in your heart you know it, too. Social Media is a waste of time.
