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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R:ED May 1st to May 7th 2011

Bill Gates Takes On Education’s Biggest Bureaucratic Beast With Video Games – “As states scramble to understand new educational standards, Gates eyes an opening for video games.” Fast Company

YouTube To Go Beyond Cat Videos By Training a New Class of Vloggers – “YouTube has just announced which members will be inducted into YouTube NextUp and the YouTube Creator Institute, efforts by the video-sharing site to add even more polish to its content.” Mashable

Why College Is Not A Bubble (Except For The University Of Phoenix) – “[...] in reality, demand for an American-style college education, and the long-term value of said degree, is unlikely to decline any time soon.” Fast Company

Openmargin Lets The World See Your Book-Margin Scribbles – “A public digital forum in every book is the Dutch startup Openmargin’s aim. It even thinks it can make money at it.” Fast Company

Study: Kindles Aren’t Quite All That With The Kids On Campus – “Researchers at the University of Washington have found that, while useful, Kindles (specifically that larger Kindles DX) aren’t all that popular with students – yet.” CrunchGear

Grovo: Video Training Platform Grabs Funding To Help Startups Educate Their Users – “Grovo positioned itself as an online education and training platform to enable Web users to find and learn how to use the Web’s most-frequented sites (and vice versa) — beginning with sites like Twitter, Mint, and Amazon.” TechCrunch

Responsibly Matches Your Gifting With A Donation To Education – “responsibly allows you to choose the specific education project you’d like to donate to, and 50% of the original proceeds of every gift purchased will go to the school, matched by another 50% of corporate sponsorship via Donor’s Choose.” TechCrunch

TV Ownership Drops for the First Time Since 1992 [REPORT] – “In a report released Tuesday, Nielsen estimated the number of U.S. households with TVs to be 114.7 million, down from 115.9 million in 2010 — a decline to 96.7% from 98.9%.” Mashable

Mapping the New Age of Augmented Travel – “Ever wanted to travel back in time to your favorite city and imagine how it actually existed hundreds of years ago? Or hear the stories of a city’s residents in their own words while going for a stroll through historical neighborhoods?” Big Think

P2P Learning Startup Skillshare Gets $550,000 From Founder Collective and SV Angel – “Skillshare is a community where people can offer classes to other members. People sign up online, and meet in person for real classes for everything from how to bake cupcakes to how to get startup funding.” TechCrunch

The University Has No Clothes – “The notion that a college degree is essentially worthless has become one of the year’s most fashionable ideas, with two prominent venture capitalists (Cornell ’89 and Stanford ’89, by the way) leading the charge.” New York Magazine

Monday Roundup: Delicious, Tungle.me and Square

In this week’s MRU we take a look at three of my favorite services, two of them got acquired and one got some serious traction.

Hence we will take a look at Delicious which was sold from Yahoo to the YouTube founders, Tungle.me got acquired by RIM and Square that got some love from Apple and Visa.

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How to Create Educational Videos for YouTube

Kirsten talks about the importance of YouTube for online teachers a lot these days. Of course not everyone of you will feel comfortable in front of a camera or maybe you simply don’t know how to start, e.g. what tools you might need to create a video.

Well, the good news is that YouTube recently partnered with three video creating tools which make it really easy even for absolute beginners in video editing or animation to create stunning videos. The bad news, there are no excuses anymore to not start an education series on YouTube.

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Take Aways from last week’s YouTube Partner Event in Paris

It took me a little moment to evaluate how to write this article dealing with the experiences and impressions I took away from the 1st French YouTube workshop dedicated to their partners.

I firmly believe that video content is becoming more powerful in 2011 than it was in 2010 and prior already and undoubtedly YouTube is the biggest and most important video platform and community out on the Internet. Any company in online education to my mind needed to be present with their own YouTube channel and even for individual educators it might add good value to their social media presence besides the other big players Facebook and Twitter.

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2011 The Year of YouTube

Next Monday I will be heading to Paris to take part in a YouTube partner event with the flamboyant title “Devenez une YouTube Star”.

The event is in partnership with the EICAR, Ecole Internationale de Creation Audiovisuelle et de Réalisation and aims at teaching YouTube creators and directors how to gain a bigger audience, produce better content and make more money.

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R:ED February 6th to March 5th 2011

  1. Readability Just Became Instapaper’s Publisher Payment Layer
  2. Google Censors Its Own Education Investment in BitTorrent
  3. 8 Educational iPhone Apps for Small Business Owners
  4. Everloop Brings New Social Network for Tweens to 56,000 Schools
  5. Meet The Father Of The Second Largest Search Engine In The World
  6. LearnBoost Adds Parent and Student Accounts to Its Gradebook (And Why That’s a Big Deal)
  7. TED Launches Quora-Like Platform for Intelligent Discussion
  8. How an Imaginative Child Learning Software Startup Avoided Death by Retail
  9. How Bill Gates’ Favorite Teacher Wants to Disrupt Education
  10. Anaheim School District Takes a Big Brother Approach to Truancy
  11. Bandwidth.com Acquires Dash Carrier Services To Add Emergency Calling To VoIP Applications
  12. StackOverflow’s Careers 2.0 Leverages Q&A To Get Programmers Hired
  13. BookRenter Raises $40 Million To Take On Chegg In Textbook Rentals
  14. Pakistan’s Education Revolution
  15. Why a Former Hedge Funder Is Building a Museum for Math
  16. Skype Teams Up With Citrix To Bring GoToMeeting Web Conferencing To Business Offerings
  17. How the iPad 2 Will Revolutionize Education

R:ED November 28th to December 4th

  1. Skype Video Chat Coming to Facebook?
  2. MyYearbook Introduces Realtime Social Gaming With Video Chat
  3. If Causes Had Its Own Social Network It Would Be Jumo
  4. BarMax’s Efficient Path To $200K In Sales: A $999.99 iPhone App; iPad Version Coming
  5. LinkedIn Thinks Publishers Need Yet Another “Share This” Button
  6. Facebook E-Commerce Platform Payvment Raises $6 Million
  7. ProFounder Launches To Help Small Businesses Crowdsource Fundraising
  8. Inside Qwiki’s Plan to Revolutionize Search [VIDEO]
  9. Sign of the Times: Toy Blocks That Teach Toddlers Social Networking
  10. 5 Innovative Classroom Management Tools for Teachers
  11. Record and Upload Music and Musings Instantly With SoundCloud Update
  12. Inside Kevin Smith’s Booming Podcast Business
  13. ROAM Brings Credit Card Reading to BlackBerrys, Outclasses Square Instantly
  14. Mingleverse Raises $1.4 Million For Online Voice And Video Chat Platform
  15. Fuze Meeting Debuts Multi-Party Video Conferencing Technology With Presence
  16. Viber For iPhone Aims To Rival Skype’s App, Is Amazingly Amazing
  17. Social Networking: The Past
  18. Tinychat’s Video Chat App Is Blowing Up On Facebook
  19. A social network built for schools
  20. YouTube’s Community Police Blow Up Another Innocent Victim
  21. Skype Staffing Up For A Big Push To The Cloud

TenMarks silently built a YouTube Channel with nearly 1300 Videos

As you might know, TenMarks is one of my favorite online education startups at the moment and I am very much looking forward to my upcoming talk and EDUKWEST interview with Rohit Agarwal, one of the co-founders of TenMarks coming Monday.

Today though I stumbled over a little tweet of TenMarks about their YouTube channel and I think this one can compete with the famous Khan Academy.

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YouTubeSocial – Watch Videos simultaneously with your Students

I just came across this nifty service on TechCrunch and thought I should share this with you as I think there are some interesting possibilities to use this in online education.

YouTubeSocial is a service that enables you and your friends to watch any video on YouTube simultaneously and you can even chat with them whilst watching the clip.

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R:ED September 12th to September 18th 2010

  1. YouTube Starts Testing New Live Streaming Platform
  2. Livemocha looks to crack Rosetta Stone with new language service
  3. Scribd Redesign Is An Attempt To Become A “Social Network For Reading”
  4. Barnes & Noble Projects $1B In Digital Revenue, 25% Market Share By 2013
  5. 5min Brings 200K How-To Videos To Dailymotion
  6. Coming Soon: Mind-Reading Cell Phones
  7. Lifeplayer, the MP3 Radio for the World’s Most Forgotten
  8. Foursquare Targets College Students with New Universities Program

R:ED July 25th to July 31st 2010

R:ED (read) is a list of stories which we have not covered on this blog but are nevertheless worth to take a look at. We will  set up such a list each Sunday from now on and hope that you will find it useful.

  1. India unveils world’s cheapest laptop
  2. LearnBoost Raises $975K To Help Teachers Manage Grades And Classrooms Online
  3. Ask.com Reinvents Itself with a Focus on Community Q&A
  4. Tinychat Boasts 500 Million Minutes Of Usage And 300,000 New Users Per Month
  5. Weebly’s ImagePerfect Gives Users Drag-And-Drop Image Editing
  6. Pearson to acquire Wall Street Institute: acquisition extends Pearson’s position as world leader in English language teaching
  7. YouTube Boosts Maximum Upload Limit To 15 Minutes
  8. Become the Master of Any Subject with a Suite of New iPhone Apps

And don’t forget to subscribe to our free webinar “Introducing the Strategic Cube for Language Learning Businesses” by Michael Butler.

YouTube + Google Moderator = Interactive Video Education Platform

Second great news for educators coming from Google today. YouTube is starting to integrate the Google Moderator tool into the platform which will be a huge thing for educators.

It will enable your viewers to ask questions which can then be voted up and down by other viewers of your channel. This way you can really see what your audience is interested in. Continue reading

YouTube lets you unlist your Videos

This is a very interesting new feature coming from YouTube. It’s basically just a little change in the privacy settings. Before that you had the choice between sharing your video with the world or with up to 25 people of your choice. So, basically the choice between on and off.

With the new option you can share your video with as many people as you like but choose to not publicly display it on YouTube. I think this could be quite interesting for edupreneurs.

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1 Billion Views per Day

1 billion views per day. Yes, per day, not per week or month. That should make YouTube the biggest broadcaster on this planet, right?

They even changed the logo to make sure, we notice it ;)

1,000,000,000 views per day!

1,000,000,000 views per day!

I don’t have exact data yet but I would say that the biggest percentage of videos are made by average people like you and me. Do you see the shift that is happening?

Good bye old world! :)

How to memorize Vocabulary?

One of my subscribers of my YouTube Channel asked my the following question.

Hi,

Could you recommend to me the best way to memorising and learning German vocabulary? Because of my lack of vocabulary I am afraid to speak German. I would be very appreciative if you could tell me how I can learn vocabulary and retain it in my memory. Would this be the same with German verbs?

Many thanks!

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