Sarah Gontijo, Founder and CEO of Hello-Hello was so kind to provide me with some background information on her language learning community and the recent launch of two new courses for learners of German and Italian.
Hence I think it’s about time to have a first look on the site.
Hello-Hello is a language learning community with learning tools like flashcards and courses in different levels. Nothing new, basically exactly the same tools Livemocha, busuu and Babbel are offering for about three years now. So, normally I could end with the review right here but there are some really interesting facts about this project that might make a difference.
Hello-Hello Course
First of all Hello-Hello is affiliated with American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and all the courses on the platform are developed in collaboration with this institution. From a first look the exercises have a clear structure and offer besides listening, speaking and writing exercises extended vocabulary and multiple choice tests. Like in the other communities learners can also record exercises and have them corrected by the community.
Of course I have to dig a bit deeper into the course structure and compare the different languages to each other but given to the fact that those courses are developed with the help of the ACTFL I think they should be of good quality. And this brings me to the first point why I think Hello-Hello could have an advantage. Although the courses of busuu and Babbel are also developed by professionals and Livemocha has teamed with Pearson for its English course none of those communities can say that their courses are developed by an” institution” like the ACTFL. This might be a very compelling reason for students to sign up with Hello-Hello. We all know how clients are, they are still looking for seals of approval.
On the other hand the partnership with ACTFL opens Hello-Hello the door to a group of over 12.000 language teachers in this institution who might be interested in offering extra content to their students but don’t trust the existing language learning communities for various reasons. Having an alternative that has a thumbs up from their association might be a good reason for them to send their students preferably to Hello-Hello.
If you sign up for the site and click around you will notice that there is not much going on designwise. No Flash driven content or other fancy stuff. It’s basically a plain HTML/php driven site with some Java script for the flashcards and recordings. And as weird as this might seem it could actually be the second advantage for Hello-Hello. You might have heard of the “war” between Adobe and Apple which basically grew around the fact that Apple is banning Flash from its devices for a couple of reasons. Google and Microsoft joined in this case the side of Apple and support HTML5.
One of the reasons why Apple banned Flash is that it is eating up resources from your device, might it be a PC or mobile device. If you now take into consideration that high speed internet is still not available for the most part of the internet users going back to a version which will run on most about any device, no matter how weak the connection or the device itself might be is actually opening a far bigger market. And in a next step you can also rightfully say that your service is iPad ready as the tablet device is perfect for a language learning service like this. And the success proves Hello-Hello right. Quoting the press release:
Recently, the company successfully launched its Spanish course for the iPad, which has become a major hit among iPad users. Hello-Hello Spanish for the iPad was launched as part of Apple’s Grand Opening for the iPad. The Hello-Hello iPad app was featured by Apple as one of their Staff Favorites; the app achieved the #2 position in the Education category shortly after the release of the iPad. Hello-Hello will be launching iPad apps for other languages in the near future.
Of course there are many open questions that are in need of an answer, monetization is one of them. If you click on the courses you will already see that they are marked as Premium Content and that they will be available for free for a limited time only. Hence we will see a bit of the same business model like on the other communities (not Babbel, of course). Offer a part of the service for free and sell premium content on top. But again, this time it may have a fair chance to work out as maybe the 12.000 educators will start selling those extra courses to their students. Maybe those educators will get a commission to make this more attractive.
Bottom line: although Hello-Hello is not reinventing the wheel with its service it has some interesting tweaks built in from the beginning that might give the community a certain advantage. Really worth keeping an eye on, I’d say.
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