Earlier this week I had the chance to talk to Gagan Biyani, Co-Founder of udemy.com and he invited me for a tour. The project is an interesting mixture of different tools we already know from other platforms but it also offers some new features that I think are quite useful for online education.
Exciting day for the guys at busuu. They just announced that busuu received a six-figure funding from an Austrian business angel who will also join the company as advisor.
But that’s not all. busuu also announced to finally launch Brazilian Portugese as sixth language to learn.
Although I have not written about TeachStreet on this blog yet, it is one of my favourite services since I have first heard of them in early 2009. The reason why I did not mention TeachStreet up to now was that they were only available in the US.
But that might change soon and hence you will read more about this company from Seattle from now on over here.
You might know Björn Lasse from my EDUKWEST interview with him and Steli Efti of SuperCool School already. But Björn Lasse is also the Principal of his own online school called StartUpSchool.
It’s an online community hosted on the SuperCool School platform that is about 1150 people strong. Amongst those start up founders, entrepreneurs and investors.
The language learning platform Myngle recently partnered with online language teacher training organization Lancelot School. Besides the regular Lancelot training and certification the school will offer a special Myngle certificate for teachers of the platform.
I interviewed Heike Philp, Managing Director of Lancelot School on this partnership.
The latest episode of This Week in Startups was as always packed with interesting callers, two pitches (this time online education start ups Babbleflix and ThereNow) and a great guest.
James Segil, Co-Founder and President of EdgeCast a content delivery network gave great insides about the internet and on how video streaming could lead us to a breaking point.
This is my new series interview series called KWestions. The aim is to give you some quick, first hand information directly from the source accompanied by a small blog post.
My first guest is Daniel Donet, Initiator and Coordinator of HaitiReact.org – Haiti Recovery Accelerator.
I love Sushi. For me it’s one of the most perfect food creations of mankind. Pure, elegant, tasty. Everything you need.
VocabSushi transfers those features into a vocabulary learning tool. You see, I am already excited about this product and yes, I admit it impressed me right from the start. Like last year, when I discovered Mingoville (watch also the EDUKWEST interview with Stephan Stephensen). So what is VocabSushi all about?
Yesterday I read about a very interesting start up in online education on TechCrunch Europe called Sparkeo. As TC was offering 100 beta invites I grabbed one immediately and signed up for it.
As video streaming is growing and growing on the internet it is great to have a targeted service for educators. So let’s have a first look on Sparkeo.
A new “menace” for Twitter goes around. According to the NYT, TechCrunch and WSJ Google wants to add “social features” to its email service GMail.
Will this be the “Twitter Killer”? Didn’t Facebook try the same?
But what makes Twitter so special anyway?
Do you remember watching Star Trek? Wasn’t it amazing that all the crew members could understand each other and communicate regardless of which country or even planet they came from? This was possible because they had this little universal translator built into the communicator.
Science Fiction you say? Well, they said this about the communicator before Martin Cooper turned the idea into the mobile phone. And now it seems as if Google is building the universal translator device. Beam me up, Scotty.
In the old days people could talk about your product or service without you hearing it. You were detached from your consumers. The only thing you could do was to set up a research amongst 100 or 1000 people and ask them some questions. But then, would they be honest or were you asking the right questions?
So basically people were talking behind your back. Wouldn’t it be great to know what people are saying about you? Why would? I got two words for you: Twitter Search.
There might be no free lunch but for a limited time, until February 28th to be exact, there is a free virtual classroom for academic teachers. Not only for a year but for a lifetime.
Remember MySpace?
Sorry, I could not resist 
. Fact is that MySpace still get millions of uniques every month and I won’t declare them dead yet, but this is another story. What is important about this first big social network is a certain kind of behaviour born around 2003/2005 that spread from MySpace to all other social media sites which came after it: whoring.
I think this background is very important so I want to share this with you before I will go to the different possible ways to use Twitter for online education companies and online teachers. So please bear with me 
.
Pearson is really on the go when it comes to new ways to deliver their material via the new distribution channels. They announced a partnership with Nokia to form a joint venture with Nokia’s mobile learning platform Mobiledu in China.
Mobiledu was launched in 2007 and offered already content of the BBC, the British Council, ETS and Wallstreet English which has been acquired by Pearson in April 2009.
We all knew it had to happen one day. And now the day has come: Livemocha finally pulled the trigger and sent a load of fresh roast mocha beans over to Rosetta Stone.
On their blog you will find three reasons why Livemocha is better than Rosetta Stone.
Over the last weeks I noticed that my Twitter stream changed. I could not put my finger on it until I dugg a bit deeper. I came up with some interesting results besides the fact that the thing which changed is that a good part of the online education companies I am following on Twitter simply went silent all of a sudden.
So I took this Sunday afternoon to collect some data which I would like to share with you. I will also start a mini series about my thoughts of Twitter and online education based on this post.
