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.
News from Parisian start up English Attack!. Apparently the beta test went quite well for the entertainment based English language learning platform and the team received some good feedback on the product.
In a recent newsletter which is linked at the end of this post you can also see some sneak peak pictures of two new games and learn something about the user mix of the platform. But to me the fact that English Attack! is planning to go premium in September for the official launch is even more interesting.
After nearly two years in business TeachStreet is making a drastic change to its platform. In an email from Dave Schappell, Founder and CEO of TeachStreet to all teachers on the platform he announced that there will be no free listings for teachers anymore. Teachers with a Basic account will have to pay $3 USD for 30 days/10 student leads.
Although this might be a shocker as the general mindset is still set on freemium on the internet today, I applaud this move. The TeachStreet blog explains the reasons very detailed and understandable but let me coin in my two cents on this.
We got interesting news from the two European competitors of Livemocha. Markus Witte, Co-Founder of Babbel wrote a blog post about the success of Babbel 2.0. If you can remember, Babbel changed from their freemium model to a premium only model in November 2009 which of course has caused some discussions if this was such a clever move.
The Co-Founder of the language learning community Busuu, Bernhard Niesner, wrote on their company blog about the launch of a new group feature on the site.
What is your association with the magic numbers 2.0? Social Media, networking, chatting and, of course, no cost or at least freemium.
Well, not anymore. At least not in education. With the launch of Babbel 2.0 the company says “Good bye” to freemium and “Hello” to advertising free premium services.
