I am currently collecting a couple of interviews with startups in the flashcard learning sector to answer the question, or at least trying to answer, if flashcards are just a feature or if you can actually build an entire company around it.
This is an excerpt of my KWestions interview with Greg Detre, co-founder and CEO of Memrise which are taking scientific approach to the subject.
As everybody is talking about the recent changes in the Google algorithm and more importantly the effects of those changes I am pleased that David Schapell, the CEO of TeachStreet, gave me his OK for a quick talk about that.
I felt Dave was just perfect for this KWestions as he has been pretty open about sharing data in the past, so I was pretty confident he would agree to share some real numbers with me and our viewers. And the didn’t disappoint in any sense.
I had the great pleasure of talking with Yoni Cheifetz, Managing Director Isreal at Lightspeed Venture Partners for this KWestions episode.
Due to the discussion around the recent modifications in Google’s algorithm and their almost immediate effect on some businesses in the online education space and beyond I couldn’t leave out this opportunity and ask Yoni for his expert opinion on that matter.
News from a veteran amongst the language learning communities: Palabea that had first launched its service in 2007 in public beta just received an investment of 1 million + Euro from the Investitionsbank Berlin Brandenburg (IBB) which turns the language learning community into one of the best funded startups in education 2.0.
I was lucky that both Regine Haschka-Hellmer, CMO and Matthias Spanic, CSO of Palabea agreed to get interviewed for KWestions on short notice.
Sometimes there are slow news weeks and other times you can barely keep up with all what’s happening.
Well, the company of my interview partner for KWestions episode 11 definitely falls under the second one as they introduced a bunch of interesting new features to their language learning community. I always enjoy having a talk with Michael Schutzler, CEO of Livemocha, not only because of his experience as CEO, his extensive knowledge but also due to the fact that he is always open and accessible and shares insights other people prefer better not to share.
Jon Bischke, serial founder of startups in the education space and currently entrepreneur in residence at Battery Ventures gave me the opportunity to interview him via email.
As he is one of the thought leaders in the hackedu space, you should follow Jon Bischke on Twitter and learn about his thoughts on the future of higher education, the Reputation Graph and more at JonBischke.com.
Yesterday evening, I was one lucky education blogger when Michael Staton, CEO and co-founder of Inigral made the time and agreed to do a KWestions interview. I’m happy to share the exciting news as one of the first with you.
Inigral, sometimes called the Facebook of Higher Education, are now partner of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. In a $4 million Series B founding round the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested $2 million, joining the existing investors Retro Venture Partners and Founders Fund.
One of my resolutions for this year is to create more videos and therefore I decided to reboot my KWVlog today. The general plan is to talk once or twice a week about what I’ve learned from my EDUKWEST interviews, blog posts and other talks.
So lets start with a recap of my latest EDUKWEST interview with Aaron Harris, co-founder and CEO of Tutorspree.
Today I had the pleasure of being amongst the first getting an interview with Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of Mahalo.com on the launch of Mahalo 4.0.
Without doubt, pivot turned out to be one of the most used words in business when thinking of 2010. So, like it or not, thinks it’s overly used but pivot is the right way to describe the new Mahalo. From user generated content it has evolved into portal where you can learn anything you want. It consists of three main components that Jason and the team identified as the most effective ones when learning on the Internet: articles, videos, Q&A.
This time I had questions for Olivia Khalili, Founder of CauseCapitalism.com. Cause Capitalism or more widely known as Social Good became more and more popular in the past years and today it seems like every second company I come across has a social mission embedded in its strategy.
As Olivia is one of the thought leaders in the social good space and as she is consulting companies on social good I asked her some KWestions.
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.
The good old KWestions format is back with a reboot. I have been thinking for a while what would be the difference between my EDUKWEST interviews and KWestions. I finally decided to do exactly what the name of the show says and ask my questions.
This will result in a more open format where I’m going to ask KWestions to people of various backgrounds about things that simply interest me and I would like to learn more about. I hope you will enjoy this relaunch.
Today, I took the chance for a quick but very insightful interview with Michael Schutzler, CEO of Livemocha on the launch of the new Active Course line and his experiences being the CEO of the world’s largest language learning community.
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
I had the pleasure to attend the first Start in Paris event on Monday founded by Laurent Kretz and Jonathan Benoudiz as a monthly platform for young start ups to pitch their ideas in front of a tech audience.
The day after the event I had the chance to make a short interview with Laurent Kretz at La Cantine, the venue the event takes place.
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.
