Comments on: Babbel receives 1 Million Euro EU Funding

By: KirstenWinkler

KirstenWinkler — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:57:09 +0000

If I read Markus Witte's blog post on Babbel correctly (the new one about abandoning the freemium model) I think they will put a lot of money in the technology.
Advertising is of course necessary but I don't think that classic PPC ads work for a service like this.

By: lingosteve

lingosteve — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:47:07 +0000

As a fellow internet language entrepreneur (LingQ.com) I congratulate Babbel. It takes a lot of money and it is a long road, sort of like Napoleon returning from Moscow. ( I am reading Adam Zamoyski's 1812 right now). I think that Rosetta Stone and Live Mocha spend most of their money on promotion. We spend our money on development and that is a bad model. I suspect the Babbel will spend more on promotion now.
I agree Michael that online learning should be used more for immigrant ESL but don't expect the language industry to give up their privileges easily. See my blog post on my experiences.
http://thelinguist.blogs.com/how_to_learn_engli...

By: Michael_Josefowicz

Michael_Josefowicz — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:19:28 +0000

I wonder if Babble has considered the amount of governemnt money spent in the States for “ESL” english as a second language. My sense is that from the EU perspective, it is an under appreciated market.

The point is that States are under severe pressure to do more with less and I would think there is an opportunity for on line language instruction. The biz model would be to offer an “enterprise” solution with adminstrative tools. PB wiki in States seems to be having success with a similar model.

My experience tells me that many of the problems at the bottom of the American educational pyramid are in fact language problems. The obvious opportunity is the growth of Spanish speakers. The less obvious opporftunity is the non standard English that is spoken at the bottom of pyramid High Schools.

By: chinamike

chinamike — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:24:31 +0000

I got to this page as well but couldn't figure out how to dig deeper. Wouldn't it be fun to actually see what the loan was for. But that might be asking too much of a public body.

By: KirstenWinkler

KirstenWinkler — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:48:10 +0000

I think this European funding is not so much about “what do you need” but more “here you have something”.

If you would like to dig deeper into our EU here is the link to this fund http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/funds/feder...

By: KirstenWinkler

KirstenWinkler — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:42:42 +0000

At the next09 conference in April this year Babbel had 300.000+ members. You can see the presentation here http://www.slideshare.net/mkwi/babbelcom-at-nex...

Compared to Livemocha you have to take into consideration that Babbel “only” available in 5 languages and more targeted towards the European / North American market. So besides Busuu they are the big player here.

By: vickidhiman

vickidhiman — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:44:11 +0000

Do you have stats on how fast are they growing? 500,000 is impressive when you consider others, but how do they compare with say LiveMocha – about 3 million users there.

By: chinamike

chinamike — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:36:34 +0000

An investment like this always worries me. Why the round number? Does the company need exactly 1 million? I would be much more willing to embrace a government loan if the figures didn't always come in round numbers. That means that somebody really sat down and figured out what was needed to turn a profit. But wait, this might not be the goal of the loan…..

BTW, does the German government have an obligation to post the details of the loan?