Tag Archives: myngle

It’s on! How I am going to compete with Livemocha, busuu and Babbel

No, I haven’t lost my marbles! But at least now I got your attention, I think.

As you know, I have pursued a side project in German language learning since April 2008 called Deutsch Happen. On the basis of a more or less regular schedule I have produced different kinds of video lessons to test out teaching ideas and to support learners of German as a foreign language who might have no access to paid solutions.

For the past couple of months I have been experimenting with some strategies on how to grow my audience on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and the results are good enough to take this to the next step: I am building a MVP.

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Monday Roundup: busuu, Myngle and WizIQ

In today’s MRU we will take a look at busuu’s newest funding round, Marina Tognetti of Myngle sharing some rare insights in a video interview, WizIQ changing its logo and Bo.lt which lets you copy and edit any website you like.
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Review:ed 2010 – October to December

This is the last part of my review 2010.

Video calling reached critical mass, live streaming comes to Facebook but is live still relevant in a world of on demand and self paced services?

Will the Internet get back to paid content and why is it so difficult to get reactions from readers?

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Review:ed 2010 – July to September

The third quarter of 2010 started with the sale of eduFire to Camelback Education which led to various posts on the business model of live lessons itself and the question if those platforms and services ever take off.

Other big topics were the PR battle between Livemocha and Rosetta Stone around the launch of their new flagship products Active Courses and TOTALe, the rise of Udemy, the pivot of YongoPal and the growing necessity of tracking and recording learning in the new decade.

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Review:ed 2010 – April to June

This is the second part of my review of 2010. April was the month when freemium got a hard kick in the behind, three companies proved this system is not the holy grail that fits in no matter what market.

In May and June we saw some early signs of trends that will become mainstream this year like video calling and a hire that brought the thunder back to a Seattle based startup.

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Review:ed 2010 – January to March

As 2010 was such a fast paced year, I thought it would be nice to go back in the archives and take a look back at the most interesting events.

So, let’s start our little trip down memory lane with the months of January, February and March 2010.

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Happy New Year! And… You are Fired!

Did I say that the last post about Myngle would be my last post? Well, resolutions, shmesolutions.

On New Year’s Eve at 4pm I received a “personal” email from Myngle, telling me that I was a bad, bad teacher and that therefore I am now moved to the waiting list. This also includes a ban from the Myngle Ning network as I just noticed and therefore most likely prevents me from gathering any information from inside “Myngleland”.

It looks like the parrot wanted to be sure that I can hold my promise this time.

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35% Commission – Is enough finally enough?

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Why are you always doing this to me? Honestly, I was perfectly OK to not write yet another flame and rant post about you but maybe, just maybe this will be the final one.

In an email to all teachers of the platform Marina Tognetti, founder and CEO of Myngle announced the new commission model that will be launched January 1st 2011. It will be topping at a whooping 35%, yes thirty five that is.

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Myngle partners with SpacedEd and Language Bridge

Myngle announced two new partnerships with language learning providers through its Changes Bulletin recently.

The companies are SpacedEd, a social learning platform that offers a mobile learning solution and Language Bridge which is a non memorization, non grammar method in form of a software for learning a language.

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Myngle: Three Prices are Enough – Biggie: Mo Money, Mo Problems

Most often the shortest emails have the biggest impact, like today.

Whilst I was baking the first plum cake of the year Myngle sent out a message to all of their teachers which consists a staggering 189 words but changes a lot for teachers, students and the platform itself.

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Myngle looses its Head. Again.

Head of Education that is. After only eight months Stefan Booy is leaving Myngle and I think this is a big loss for the company as he started some really good initiatives on the platform which in general went in the right direction.

In his email to the teachers of the platform he says the reasons for leaving Myngle are basically personal ones as working in business development and being Head of Education were very taxing for him as well as for Myngle.

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Myngle is bigger than Apple and Facebook – according to Shop Commission

That is if you take into account that both Apple and Facebook are taking “only” a 30% cut for products sold on their platforms and Myngle is taking 40% for content sold by teachers on the Myngle Shop.

Normal reactions on taking 30% are moaning that it is quite a hefty chunk but saying on the other hand “Hey, it’s Apple and Facebook. They have a huge market share and offer me access to a huge potential client base so I will bite the bullet.”

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Virtual Classroom vs Skype / VoIP only – Round #1

Almost 10 months ago I hosted the first E-Teachers Conference and in case you are wondering what happened to it, I am working on the launch of the new and revised version .

Anyway, the topic of the event was “Lesson Slides and Virtual Classrooms – do we really need them?”. I would love to share the recording with you but due to some “hick ups” that led to the total crash and burn of the meeting there is none available. Also the second part of the evening that was backed up by eduFire did not record the event properly.

Two take aways from this evening: I am known as Skype fan girl and Heike Philp’s legendary 20 reasons why to prefer a virtual classroom to Skype only in language teaching. This blog post has recently been republished by Stefan Booy on the Myngle blog. I was thinking of writing a quick response to this but the more I thought about it the more it became clear that it can’t be done in just one post.

Hence I decided to give my two cents on every single point in a series of, yes, you guessed it, twenty blog posts starting today with reason number one:

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Livemocha launches Affiliate Program

As the online learning space 2.0 is going in its third year and hence more stable and predictable Livemocha set up an affiliate program and share 20% of each package sale and even 40% for each subscription.

This could be an interesting opportunity for bloggers in the language learning space to make some extra money.

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Myngle now ahead by a beak?

Yesterday, I received one of the new and regularly coming News Bulletins from the Myngle education team. Normally you can get the news by reading the email for gist but this one caught my attention as it presents some substantial additions to the platform.

In fact the coming changes could give Myngle a lead over its competitors.

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Myngle breaks the Trend and forces Teachers to take higher Prices

Since language learning platform Myngle have promoted Stefan Booy to Head of Education there is a lot going on. Apparently Stefan is trying to catch up with issues that had been discussed for a while in the forum but never really been attacked by the company before.

For about two months things change rapidly and although the process is not finished Myngle took a major decision yesterday. The platform now has a minimum price of 9 Euro for 30 minutes and 13 Euro for 45 minutes of 1:1 teaching.

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Two Online Education Start Ups will pitch on the Plugg Start Up Rally

This year’s edition of the Plugg conference will have two online education start ups on the Start Up Rally. Every year a jury of experts selects 20 companies for the short list of the Rally. Those companies will then pitch during the conference and eventually there will be one winner selected by the jury and one winner selected by the audience.

The Plugg conference is founded and hosted by Robin Wauters who you might also know as writer of TechCrunch.

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Myngle partners with Lancelot School to Train and Certify its Teachers

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.

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Partnerships, Partnerships, Partnerships

shakehands

For a long time I did not cover all the new partnerships that were made in the education 2.0 sector. One reason for this is the huge amount of new companies which enter the game.

Really exciting times but nevertheless lets have a look at the “grown up” rebels. You will see that there is lots going on, too. Especially building alliances with the established top dogs in education.

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