Short Update on my Livemocha Experience

It is very difficult to double your prices after you start a service especially in this environment. I can see the appeal of getting in early but I wouldn't put too much trust in the ability of them to quickly double prices.

Moreover if they are splitting their earnings this is equivalent to a much higher cut than Myngle earns. As we have seen already pricing and scheduling is a tricky thing to get right. From a teacher's point of view, I support Myngle's market based pricing-- if only their implementation were a bit more flexible (and analog) in nature.

Well, this is all beta now but:

You can apply to become a teacher on Livemocha. Depending on your teacher score and your native language you will be featured in their teachers list.

If a student wants to have a conversation session, he enters what language he speaks and what language he wants to learn. Then he gets the list of teachers and can book.

Teachers will have their own schedule with and there will be a ranking according to the earned teacher point, I think. They will get paid by Livemocha for the lessons they give either by Livemocha points or by cash (PayPal I suppose).

The price for a 15 minute course is 5,95 USD right now but limited to the first 500 subscribers. I think the price might double after that. How much a teacher will get is not mentioned yet, I think. But supposing a 15min lesson will cost 9,95 USD and a 50/50 share it might be interesting to teach there.

Therefore I would define the teachers as freelancers.

You said they will provide English teaching in 15-minute blocks. Any ideas on whether the teachers will be internal of free-lancers like Myngle?

I think it's all about conversion rates. Having 2.000.000 members registered does not equal 2.000.000 members active on the platform.

From my experience Livemocha has a very strong and stable community. Most of my contacts there I know from the beginning and they are still learning on this platform on a regular basis.

If you increase your advertising efforts it does not necessarily lead you to the same quality traffic you had before by word of mouth propaganda. It just helps you to get some new members by the conversion rate.

This may be one explanation why the first million lead to a higher traffic as the second million which might be generated by a Google Adwords campaign. We know this phenomenon from other platforms. A lot of "users" in the data base but only 1% active on the platform. Signing up is easy...

Sooner or later (sooner, I think) Livemocha will become the number 1 competitor for Myngle, eduFire and WiZiQ in one of their potential client groups: students who prefer to learn alone with a private teacher. These students are usually very focused and have a goal they want to achieve (learn german for business in 6 month, french for travel in 4 weeks, etc).

So Livemocha is not the one who is reacting, they are the one who act.

Livemocha will be offering them the possibility to book a teacher for a 15 minute conversation course besides all their free online resources and paid premium content.
This means Livemocha cuts down the minimum of 30 minutes for a course like on Myngle another 50%. As this is still a beta and only available for English teachers I cannot tell much about it but this is gonna be a very interesting thing especially for busy students like managers (huge market)!

Therefore I wouldn't say that Livemocha is competing for the same customers, they are taking care of a market segment that is not really served yet. But sure, this is a loss for platforms like Myngle, eduFire and WiZiQ and they have nothing at the moment to offer against it. Myngle has a library, eduFire and WiZiQ have flashcards but I don't see that students are using them that much like they do on Livemocha.

For me Livemocha will be one of the big players in this online education market. Their concept is brilliant as far as I understood it from making my own conclusions. They have a strong community, they bind their customers with incentives to the platform, they basically offer a one stop solution for learning languages when they have finished their project. The two biggest drawbacks I see there are: 1) the quality if the provided free content. Community generated content requires an extra post but I'll give you my ideas on that very soon.
2) The community itself. Do the so far targeted markets have the potential bringing Livemocha paying customers or do they have to attack new markets besides their strong presence in India and China?
A first sign may be that they offer Livemocha in Korean now and South Korea is certainly a very good market for language related companies.

You start for free, learn with the flashcards, corrected by the community.
You want to learn more, you buy a premium course and / or take 15min conversation lessons with a real teacher.
You earn Livemocha points by contributing flashcard sets or corrections. These you will be able to exchange against other premium content or conversation lessons etc. No need to go somewhere else, when you are in there already. To my mind Livemocha has the potential becoming the platform for the all in one solution although there is still some way to go..

Darn, but I am a bit curious about these numbers. A look at their web traffic doesn't seem to bear out a doubling in membership. There is an uptick, but certainly not a doubling.

I wonder what these figures really mean.

Another curious but probably unrelated thing was that in the past month or so as Livemocha showed an increase in page views (or whatever is being compared on Alexa) Myngle's page views decreased. I wonder if the audience for these two services is closely related.

In other words, to what extent are Livemocha and Myngle in competition for students?

If they are, then you can expect them to engage in a features war...Hmm.

So, here is my big picture question. Do features on these sites appear primarily in reaction to customer needs or in direct reaction to the competition?