Today, I learned something really interesting. It seems as if Skype is not respecting French law and therefore is “illegally operating” in France. At least, that’s according to the blog Tic et Net of the French magazine L’Express.
It is not about the VoIP from PC to PC that is causing those legal implications but about the SkypeOut service which needed to be declared as a telecommunication service provider in France. But Skype have apparently refused to do so.
Interesting news from Kara Swisher over at All Things Digital. Apparently, the Kno is in talks to sell its hardware manufacturing part of the company and then focus on software and digital textbook delivery only.
According to sources the “quicker than expected uptake” in tablet production of other manufacturers basically made the need for a dedicated educational hardware device “less critical”.
A couple of days ago Khan Academy announced a partnership with BitTorrent, up to now mostly known for being the place to get illegal copies of whatever you want. Sure, the technology itself is brilliant and in combination with a project like the Khan Academy it has the potential to bring video lessons even to places with low bandwidth connections.
The problem is that today Google blacklisted the service because of its reputation being a harbor for illegal activities.
I have always been a firm believer that language and culture are inseparable. If you start teaching or learning a language the culture will play a major role from day one. Often the culture of a certain part of the world is even the reason why we want to learn a new language.
This week Livemocha and eduFire added some nice features to their platforms, both very different from each other but both emphasizing the cultural aspects.
TeachStreet have shared some interesting data with us just recently on their blog. When I got the opportunity yesterday, I chimed in for a quick talk with TeachStreet’s founder and CEO David Schappell.
In a nutshell, their efforts of building a great site where teachers can offer classes both locally and online starts to accelerate. When we compare the traffic on the site in January 2010 with January 2011, we can state that it has tripled during that time.
Competition is good, especially for the customers. Today, Busuu, now 1.5 million users strong, announced a new partnership with The Guardian and MacMillan, two well established brands and as British as five o’clock tea and scones (in the Savoy, of course).
To quote from another recent press release in that space, the partnership “catapults” Busuu in the intermediate level and above learning sector.
Visiting the Smart.fm website you will notice that the service is announcing its migration to a new (old) site called iKnow!. Smart.fm will shut down on March 31st and does not take new registrations for that matter.
I have always been a big fan of the service although I never actively used it. And that seems to be one of the problems Smart.fm had, leading to the decision to turn the platform into a premium language learning service.
If you are a viewer of EDUKWEST, I hope you are, you might know already that I had Leni Mayo, the co-founder of Learnable on the show just recently (slight hint to watch the interview).
Learnable is still in closed beta and preparing for its launch later this month but I believe it is rather risk-free to predict this platform’s impact on the education 2.0 market already now.
Another year, another partnership for Livemocha. The world’s leading language learning community, now over 8 million users, teams up with Europe’s leading provider of distance business English training goFLUENT.
So, finally we will see the integration of live lessons into a language learning community.
This is truly an exciting week for education 2.0. After yesterday’s launch of Mahalo 4.0 which takes on the asynchronous video learning market which an additional live Q&A community part, another well known player entered the field of language learning communities today.
Babylon, the software based dictionary that launched in 1997, is now offering an online community for linguists in its newest version 9 release. The company also teamed up with Ginger Software, a contextual spell and grammar checker.
Over the past couple of weeks Jason Calacanis was dropping quite a few hints in which direction his company might evolve in the near future and that Mahalo 4 would be a pivot, being launched on the DLD conference today.
For about two hours the new Mahalo is online and it looks pretty neat. To me it’s a mixture of EHow meets Khan Academy meets SquareSpace.
Flat World Knowledge, the world’s leading publisher of open source text books raised $15 million USD in a series B round from Bertelsmann Digital Media, other investors and angels.
The really interesting thing about Flat World Knowledge is that it actually disrupts two business models of other startups in the $8 billion USD textbook market. They are disrupting disruption if you will.
I am not a big fan of widgets and applications on websites but it only took me 5 minutes from first seeing this one to having it installed here.
Since last night this blog is Apture Enhanced which you might have noticed when scrolling down the page. A bar with share options and a search field will pop up at the top. But that’s not the really cool part about Apture.
With Apture you can now mark any word or combination of words on this blog and “learn more” about it, all without leaving the page. It’s absolutely amazing.
A few days ago Jason Renshaw posted an article around his feelings and observations around the increasing dominance of Pearson in the education world over the past couple of years. Today, Pearson announced that the company increased its shareholding in TutorVista to a controlling 76% stake for $127 million USD raising the total investment of Pearson in TutorVista to $139 million USD.
Is this the rise of an 800 pound gorilla in online education which will dominate the whole market from school education over ESL to math and science?
So, the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) company Salesforce bought the web conferencing platform Dimdim for $31 million USD in cash.
Right after the announcement of the deal, Dimdim changed its landing page stating that they won’t accept new clients anymore, the old clients could use the service during the transition period until March 15th as they had done before. After that period the service will shut down completely as it seems.
That was a question I have asked myself for a couple of months, basically since Jon Bischke sold the startup to Camelback Education back in July 2010.
Watching the site from a distance, there was not really much going on and updates were related to problem fixing and the transition of the platform. It seemed as if eduFire was turning into eduSmoke.
Busuu launched a new interesting feature for their premium subscribers last week, called the MyBusuu Study Guide. This feature is developed in partnership with the Salzburg Research Institute and lets students set their personal study goals and track the progress over time.
Also, the tests at the end of each section got a refresh and will now adapt the questions to the mistakes the learner had made during the sections.
Last week Jani Penttinen, Founder and CEO made a big announcement on the Xiha blog about a new product called Premium Fan Page. Today, on his way back from Las Vegas, he posted a follow up of his experiences on the CES.
The product is based on Xiha’s technology that enables you to instantly translate Tweets and Facebook updates of your friends when they are writing in a language you don’t understand. In a globalized world with personal networks reaching around the globe a common case.
In 2010 we saw happening a lot and I still have to catch up with everything for myself. It seems as if the 12 months were 24 or 36, so much innovation happening in such a short period of time.
One topic that came up during the year was of course Skype. All the features and upgrades to this service alone show how quickly the tech sector is moving forward and also how quickly we learned to adapt ourselves to new trends. Last week, Skype officially launched their new iPhone app. I believe this is going to be a breach in the dike of how people will communicate.
This is one of those ideas that are brilliant because of their simplicity. Sure, it might help that Dave Schappell used to be working at Amazon and therefore still having a close eye on the company.
I think, when he learned about the Universal Wish List feature it immediately made click.
