Every day, over 15,000 new users join busuu.com to improve their language skills with other native speakers and our award-winning courses. No wonder we are the world’s most active online community for learning languages.

If you want to learn languages on the go, our apps for iPhone and Android (e.g. Samsung, LG and Motorola) are an ideal add-on to our online community. In June 2011, our app won the “Stiftung Warentest” for Best Mobile English Vocabulary Trainer. At peak times, we register 40,000 downloads a day. Downloads for the Android apps in particular have gone through the roof: in only 3 months almost 1,500,000 apps from this particular operating system have been downloaded.

The apps are available for all nine languages offered on the website and do not require an internet connection to access the content. They include 20 free learning units for each language – full content with over 3,000 words and key phrases can be purchased from inside the app, from beginner to intermediate level. You can even synchronise the app with your busuu.com profile and earn busuu-berrieswherever you are. Get your own app now!

We plan to grow even more in the future and soon we’ll add new languages to make busuu.com available for even more people around the globe.

This was the third year that The Europas took place, in 2010 we received a ‘Highly Commended’ in the category ‘Best Learning Startup’. The advisory board, formed by 22 key European VCs and journalists, selected the finalists from 400 candidates which then went to the public vote and generated about 40,000 online votes. Almost 500 people attended the award ceremony in London to celebrate the best of Europe’s startups, VCs and entrepreneurs.

Thanks again for your votes and this important award! This is an amazing recognition which motivates us to continue working hard and to keep improving busuu.com!

Voting is easy: Go to the category ‘Best Education, Recruitment, Media Startup‘ and vote for busuu.com. In 2010 we were ‘Highly Commended‘ in the category ‘Best Learning Startup’. This year we want to do even better. Help us win the award for ‘Best Education, Recruitment, Media Startup’ and vote for us now!

Online education has grown strongly in the past few years. In the case of language learning, it makes sense to go online: busuu.com connects people from over 200 countries worldwide who teach and learn languages in our online community.

In only 3 years we have grown to become a community with over 4 million users. Let’s keep up the good work and show the world that we really are one of the best European Tech Startups! Vote for us and tell your friends, too!

The winners will be announced on 17 November 2011 in London. We will of course let you know if we are selected.

We have grown rapidly, with over 1,000,000 new users in just 4 months. That is equal to 10,000 new users every day, who all want to teach and learn languages on busuu.com!

In fact, our online language community is now almost as large as the population of Madrid (where our head office is based). Imagine the whole city writing and correcting exercises on busuu.com!

Since we started in May 2008, you and the rest of our online community have:

• earned more than 770 million busuu-berries
• written or recorded more than 8 million exercises
• made more than 18 million corrections
• completed more than 50 million learning unit parts

Assuming that each learning unit part takes around 10 minutes to do, we have already provided over 950 years of language learning. In other words, we covered almost a millennium of language training in just 3 years!

Once again, thank you for your participation and support. We are thrilled to have such a strong community and look forward to continue growing with you.

Last year is already history as 2011 has started with a lot of positive energy! Nevertheless, we believe it’s still worth taking a closer look at all the stuff that happened with busuu.com in 2010.

January

• We announced a strategic partnership with the renowned language learning brand PONS, the second biggest publisher in Germany; we now offer detailed grammar explanations in 6 different languages to our German, Spanish, Italian and French native users.
• We expanded our language learning platform by adding new review features and customisable exams to our existing learning tools.

February

• busuu.com was a finalist in the BBVA Open Talent competition, being the 5th most voted project (with more than 6,000 votes) out of more than 400 participants.
• We launched our fully interactive Brazilian Portuguese language course, the 6th language in our portfolio
• We translated our interface into Portuguese to welcome our new Portuguese-speaking users (mainly from Brazil), who enriched our growing community with their positive Latin vibes!
• We closed our first financing round with an Austrian business angel, enabling us to further strengthen our rapid international growth.

March

• Our project received more awards as we won the Innovators Award at the CeBIT fair in Germany, one of the most important events for the digital industry in Europe.
• We launched our new groups feature, letting our users create their own content around topics of their choice; this popular feature now has more than 5,000 groups.
• We surprised our users with our fun Easter egg hunt – so watch out again this Easter for the golden egg to win some Premium Memberships! ;-)

May

• busuu.com had its second birthday which we celebrated with more than 450,000 users registered users from over 200 different countries.
• We were selected as the Red Herring 100 European Winner, a competition that recognises the most innovative companies in Europe.

June

• We launched our Travel course for all the language basics you need when travelling abroad, available as a PDF for easy use on the go.

July

• One of busuu.com’s co-founders gave a keynote speech at an international conference at the University of Greenwhich to share his thoughts on the future of e-learning.

August

• We launched our first language game, in which users can challenge each other on their language skills to win juicy busuu berries!
• We implemented our interactive Russian course, bringing our total offering to 7 different languages and opening the gates to our active Russian community.

September

• busuu.com went mobile with our 7 new iPhone applications, which include our full content and are available for free download from the iTunes App Store.

October

• We implemented a new alphabet section (previously developed for the Russian course) for our other 6 languages, based on users’ feedback.
• We reached the important landmark of more than 1 million registered users, making busuu.com Europe’s largest web 2.0 community!
• We announced a strategic partnership with leading publisher Collins, letting us offer detailed grammar explanations for 4 languages to our native English speakers.
• We moved to our new offices next to Madrid’s green Retiro Park because the busuu.com team has grown rapidly!

December

• We launched our campaign to save the nearly extinct Busuu language – including a our funny YouTube music video (now seen by 200,000+ people) and our Save Busuu Facebook fanpage (with nearly 6,000 fans worldwide) – which received lots of media coverage.

Phew…as you can see, 2010 was a very busy, successful year for our small start-up! Thank you again for all of your support and feedback – the above has only been possible with your help!

But watch out for 2011! We have ambitious plans and exciting new features in the pipeline already – so rest assured that we won’t stop until we create the best language learning solution on Earth! :-)

So, we wish our users all the best and are looking forward to a fantastic 2011!