Competition is good, especially for the customers. Today, Busuu, now 1.5 million users strong, announced a new partnership with The Guardian and MacMillan, two well established brands and as British as five o’clock tea and scones (in the Savoy, of course).
To quote from another recent press release in that space, the partnership “catapults” Busuu in the intermediate level and above learning sector.
Another year, another partnership for Livemocha. The world’s leading language learning community, now over 8 million users, teams up with Europe’s leading provider of distance business English training goFLUENT.
So, finally we will see the integration of live lessons into a language learning community.
Busuu just announced a new strategic partnership with the publisher Harper Collins. Native English speaking premium users of Busuu will now have access to grammar guides for Spanish, French, German and Italian.
This is basically an extension of the existing deal with the publisher PONS which is providing grammar guides for the native German, Spanish, French and Italian speakers of the community.
Today the language learning community busuu.com and the renown German publisher PONS announced a partnership forming the third collaboration between an online community and a classic publisher after Livemocha / Pearson and Babbel / Hueber / Collins.
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.
Some weeks ago Myngle.com announced a new partnership. They teamed up with the Latvia based social network ONE.lv. A press release should have followed. As time goes by and I am sure there will be other topics to talk about, soon I decided publish this draft today. So, let’s have a quick look on the facts as I know them.
In one of my last blog posts I wrote about the partnership announcement of Livemocha.com and Pearson.com.
One day later I came across the announcement of FriendsAbroad.com that they are now a part of the language learning platform Babbel.com.
Then LanguagesOutThere.com, a content provider for ESL material, announced a partnership with italki.com.
And finally this morning I saw the following tweet of Jon Bischke, CEO of eduFire.com:
Ok, this tweet might just be a joke, it probably is but still I think there is some kind of a trend towards teaming up between different companies in the education sector which can complement each other. Or is it to beef up for a weak economy in 2009 and to show some muscles to the competitors?
Livemocha.com and Pearson.com join forces to co-develop a number of conversational English language courses which will be accessible on Livemocha’s online platform in August 2009.
This partnership will further transform the language learning marketplace, empowering and engaging anyone across the globe who wants to learn English.
Shirish Nadkarni, CEO of Livemocha
