busuu.com | the language learning community

busuu.com and the future of e-learning

This week Bernhard, one of the Co-Founders of busuu.com was invited to hold a keynote speech at the conference “Future Learningscapes – a 21st century Challenge” organized by the University of Greenwich close to London.

Bernhard shared his experience of managing Europe´s leading online community for learning languages and gave his thoughts about how future learningscapes could look like.

According to his opinion, future learning will include a mix of learning activities (self-studying, peer-to-peer-learning, live teachers) and learning places (offline, online, mobile). Additionally, technology will be used in a much smarter way in order to improve the effectiveness of the learning progress of each student.

The conference was a great experience, a fantastically organized event and it was very good to see that the academic world more and more is aware of innovative learning tools like busuu.com, which could be used to improve the way students learn new languages within their academic studies.

busuu.com offers new Travel Course

busuu.com now offers you a brand new Travel Course to help you to get ready for your holidays!

This interactive course contains all of the essential words and expressions you need to know when you travel abroad. It also includes new exclusive features such as role plays plus a very useful PDF with survival phrases to carry around. This course is available in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese.

You have three different options to get access the Travel Course:

Invite your friends:

If you successfully invite 10 of your friends to busuu.com you will have free access to our travel course. You can directly invite them via our website and once they signed up, you will get immediate access!

Buy it now online:

If you can’t wait to try our new course, you can also get an immediate access to the Travel Course in all languages by buying it online for only 9.99 EUR!

Become a Premium user:

Premium users have free access to the travel course. The course will automatically be added to the existing Premium features. So upgrade now your account and enjoy the full range of learning functionalities!

We hope you will enjoy this new course and we are sure it will perfectly prepare you for your holidays abroad!

busuu.com named Red Herring Top 100 European Innovator

We are very proud to announce that busuu.com has been officially elected as the Red Herring 100 European Winner 2010! The award was received during the official awards ceremony in Paris today. Established in 1996, Red Herring 100 lists are regarded as an invaluable instrument to discover and advocate the most promising private ventures from around the world. All lists consider both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management and execution of strategy.

busuu.com was selected out of several hundred participants across Europe.

The Red Herring 100 award adds to our increasing list of prestigious recognitions, such as:

• Innovator’s Award at CeBIT
• Finalists in the BBVA Open Talent Competition
• European Language Label from the European Commission
• AlwaysON Global 250 Winner
• Silver Lion in the Cannes Marketing Festival
• Finalists in best Spanish Website Award!

It shows that we are on the right track in building an innovative tool for learning languages.  We want to thank all our users for helping us in continuously improving our platform!

Earn more busuu-berries for excellent writing exercises and helpful corrections!

You can now earn additional busuu-berries for excellent writing excercises or very helpful text corrections of other users’ exercises. So, how does it work?

Writing exercises
If your writing exercise is given a four- or five-star rating by at least three other users, you will receive five bonus busuu-berries!  So try to write as well as you can – you can be sure your efforts will be rewarded!

Likewise, if you think that a writing exercise of another user is excellent, simply give it a great rating and reward them with some extra berries!

Text corrections
If your text correction of a writing exercise is given the thumbs up button by at least three other users, you will also receive five bonus busuu-berries!  So try to be as thorough as possible when correcting other users’ exercises and you will be rewarded with extra berries.

On the other hand, if someone has put a lot of effort into correcting your exercise, click the thumbs up button to reward them with extra berries too.

The same applies for group discussion entries – if you really like a users’ contribution to a discussion within a group, simply vote for it to help them earn additional busuu-berries.

With this new feature, we want to give an extra reward to both hard-working students and to excellent correctors!

Happy birthday busuuuuu!

This is a very special week for busuu.com: we’re celebrating our 2nd birthday!

Exactly two years ago, busuu.com was launched. Starting as just a simple idea, our community has grown significantly and very quickly. Here are some of our impressive numbers:

• More than 450,000 users from all over the world have signed up with us to learn languages online!
• More than 1.3 million writing exercises have been corrected by our helpful community in 6 different languages.
• More than 109 million ‘busuu-berries’ have been earned by busuu.com’s members!

This rapid development would never have happened without your great support!

That’s why we’d like to thank all of you and celebrate our birthday with a special present – for the next seven days, all members of our community can:

• try out our Premium Membership for FREE!
• take advantage of a 10% discount on all our memberships!

If you’re already a Premium user, you’ll soon receive a 14-day Premium Membership voucher via email to send to one of your friends to share the busuu.com experience.

So let’s celebrate our 2nd birthday together and we hope you’ll enjoy your presents!

Thanks again for creating this wonderful community! Let´s do busuu!

The busuu.com team