Along with their official launch, I had the chance to meet with Patrick Randolph of Talkwheel for an EDUKWEST.
Talkwheel are based in SF and the platform allows its users to communicate and collaborate in a very visual way. Although not exclusively designed for education, it clearly makes sense in our context when you think of teachers maintaining thread with their students, seminar groups or student groups.
EDUKWEST on tour has always had a special feel to it and as much as I like connecting with great start-up people via Skype, I have to say that I truly enjoy visiting companies when I have the opportunity to do so.
Episode 63 is such an on tour video, I’ve met with Michel Nizon and team of Edulang at their office in Morlaix, France. Yes, innovation can happen in the most remote places and I love that this is possible thanks to working online, connecting with people and the possibility of finding customers all around the world!
I had the pleasure of interviewing LearnBoost’s founder and CEO Rafael Corrales on how came up with the initial idea and how he and his team have shaped it until it became what we see today: a nicely made gradebook with pretty design, easy to create & mangage lesson plans, functions to share student progress with the parents and the possibility to integrate with Google Apps.
LearnBoost is currently free to use and I hope you’ll get a good idea of LearnBoost’s capabilities watching our EDUKWEST but essentially you have nothing to lose, so I’d say anyone interested should definitely go and open an account!
In this week’s EDUKWEST I interview Travis Millman, VP of product for EnglishCentral Inc. Although still quite concentrated on the Asian market, I think it’s a nice product worth having a look at from both teacher and student side.
EnglishCentral consists of three main areas, one is to watch authentic videos dealing with different topics such as politics or entertainment. Second is to learn all relevant vocabulary, also structured according to topics for instance introductions or culture. The third element is to learn to speak or more specifically how to pronounce words.
Looking from a student perspective, I like that it’s pretty customizable and that I don’t have to watch this or that video but define my fields of interest and thus get only relevant lessons for me.
There is always a multitude of reasons why I enjoy talking with him [Koichi], not only that he appeared in one of the very first episodes (EDUKWEST #4) and gave me some credit sort of ex ante the interview concept had proven itself to be more than just a flash in the pan but also as our online careers (if you want to call it like that) began approximately the same time and if you have a closer look and compare you’ll find quite some parallels.
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Besides knowing that he wants to disrupt (no, I don’t think that the term is overused when talking about some people at least) the Japanese textbook industry, I was also keen on hearing his reasons to quit live teaching. I’ve my own reasons for that but seeing him doing the same at again almost the same point was quite interesting.
I’m particularly happy to share the newest EDUKWEST with you all today as it covers a new new trend that is manifesting itself in online education. What we got out as one of the important results of that recent busuu study is the motivation why people want to invest time and effort in learning a language and that is for travel.
TripLingo is one of the first startups of this new wave of language learning and traveling. TripLingo is based of the initial idea of founder and CEO Jesse Maddox back in the days he was traveling and working in Asia and was then shaped at Startup Weekend Atlanta where he also found his team.
This is a small snippet of my latest EDUKWEST interview with Andreas Schroeter, one of the co-founders of bab.la.
bab.la in a German startup based in Hamburg. The product is built around an online dictionary but it offers a ton of additional features like flashcards, games, a community, embeddable widgets for blogs or websites and various iPhone applications.
In this interview of my EDUKWEST series I talked to Jeffrey Evans, one of the co-founders of MindSnacks which currently launched their iPhone / iPod application for Spanish learners on the iTunes App Store.
This part of the interview was about the typical user of their application, which age they have and if there are issues that the application could be seen as too playful.
In this interview I talked with the three Co-Founders of the language teaching platform Lingueo, Guillaume le Dieu de Ville, Arnaud Portanelli & Johann Querne about their recent funding of 500K Euro.
We talked about how the process of finding investors went and of course their plans on how to invest the money into the growth of their company.
In this EDUKWEST interview I talked with Sarah Gontijo, Founder and CEO of the language learning community hello-hello.
It was once more a very interesting and insightful interview and Sarah’s passion for her product really comes through. hello-hello is another great example of how the right team at the right time can basically outdistance competitors which started earlier in the race. Continue reading
In this EDUKWEST interview I talked to the Co-Founders of YongoPal Darien Brown (CEO) and Jon Hickey (CTO) about their new service.
YongoPal is a platform that is targeting the South Korean ESL market with conversation training. The service connects South Korean university students with American students and aims to train English conversation skills.
Continue reading
