Grüsse
Daniel

amicamia
yasemin

My name is Marina Tognetti, the founder of Myngle.

Thank you for your comments and input, which we always value as you can learn from your users as well as other constructive feedback.

I personally think that LiveMocha is a great system, the results achieved to date prove this and we look at them as example of a successful player in this new and growing online learning industry. Same for Chinesepod, they bring scalability to language education.

Myngle has a somewhat different approach. Its aim is to provide a good learning experience to students that are serious about learning a foreign language. This means strong focus on quality of teaching in the broader sense, from the selection and training and certification of teachers (out of 3000 registered on Myngle, only 10% are currently visible on the platform to teach), good content (we are working hard on this), as well as helping students make the right choice of programs and teachers that best fit their needs.

That said, I am glad there are very good players out there like LiveMocha, as the challenge for all of us at this moment is not competition, but opening a new segment and bringing a $ 20 billion industry online. We all are facing the same challenge as pioneers in this new segment. We are now probably covering 0,1% (or less?) of this market. 99,9% is still out there for us.
So, if we all work well and we build credibility amongst the huge potential pool of students who are still learning in the offline world, we all win.

@ Robin: thank you for the review.  I will be glad to meet you in Brussels next week (Plugg)

@ Razib Ahmed: why don’t you just give it a try? We have students who took A LOT of (paid) lessons, so I think they must be happy with the experience. A test lesson is free, but if you mail us we will give you a free coupon for a paid lesson as well. So the risk is on us.

@ Gabe & Michel Nizon: agree with you both, the proof is in making sufficient money with the business model. Especially now, in a moment of economic downturn, it is critical to turn curious visitors into repeat, paying customers in order to turn this into a long term business. That is why we are focusing on the more serious students, those who are willing to pay for learning a language.

In any case, I do not think we have all the answers ready now, but we have been learning enormously in these first 14 months of ‘Myngle life’, developing and moving forward at a fast pace.

What you see now on the platform is just the tip of the iceberg, (much) more to come in the near future. Stay tuned…

Marina

as a Myngle team member I am really happy to read this article and all the comments to it. I agree that in the end real costumers will prove the quality of the service, so from our side we will continue on improving the platform and take the new challenges ahead of us with the Myngle positive spirit ,

Elisa

of course you think that edufire is better, you are an edufire team member, saw you in an edufire t-shirt in a picture and in a video on their homepage. On the edufire blog there is a picture of you and the team. here’s the link
http://blog.edu...ire.com/page/4/

Kind of biased opinion don’t you think?

Japanese owned worldia.net has been around a fair bit longer, and “the focus on skype” tagline was used much earlier by them too.

However, from a business perspective, I think there are fundamental problems with trying to be the eBay of live voice-based instructional services. eBay succeeds as a natural monopoly because its goods are physical. However there is no natural monopoly that applies when the goods are service-based. Some of these businesses might succeed in providing income for a few employees. However, I’m not sure whether they can ever reap VC-style gains.

In all seriousness, it’s really nice and I feel like the teachers there are very competent and provide a nice and fun learning experience.