Reflections on 2011 and Best Wishes for 2012

Another successful year has passed and we’re all ready to begin 2012 with lots of energy and motivation!

But before rushing into this new year, let’s have a quick look back at an eventful and successful 2011 with busuu.com:

January

• We started our Blog series on endangered languages to raise awareness about nearly extinct languages. Every couple of months we introduce you to another endangered language.

February

• We entered a strategic partnership with The Guardian and the Macmillan Dictionary to offer you fresh learning content daily. English learners can read and comment on Guardian articles and look up words in the integrated Macmillan Dictionary.

March

• We launched a voice recording exercise! With this function, you can record your own voice and send it to native speakers to get feedback on your pronunciation.
• In collaboration with IE Business School we presented the busuu.com Language Barometer, the largest worldwide online survey about the future of language learning. See the results here!

April

• We included new features in our popular iPhone app and made it also available for iPad to enhance your mobile learning experience!
• Having been a huge success in 2010, we repeated our big Easter Egg Hunt to find the golden egg! Among the successful hunters we did a raffle for 10 Premium Memberships!
• Martin Varsavsky, a great fan of busuu.com and well respected entrepreneur, supported us with his investment to continue our successful journey in the online world of language learning.

May

• We added Polish and Turkish to our existing language courses and thus made our community available to Polish and Turikish users. Once again: Witam and Hoşgeldiniz!
• We celebrated our 3rd Birthday! Thanks to all of you for the many good wishes 🙂

June

• We launched a Travel App with integrated Survival Guide for iPhone and iPad! We hope you enjoyed your holidays!
• ‘Stiftung Warentest’, a very renowned German foundation on product testing, awarded our mobile apps as the best mobile vocabulary trainer.

July

• Another milestone: We passed 3,000,000 users on busuu.com!
• It wasn’t only our community on busuu.com which was growing constantly this year, we also reached more than 100,000 fans on Facebook!

August

• Every language learner should have a great dictionary and that’s why we packed all our busuu.com Vocabulary content into the busuu.com dictionary
• After the huge success of our iPhone Apps, we launched the apps for Android devices too, such as HTC, Samsung, Motorola etc.!

September

• We took our courses to the next level, creating further content, including a new course for Business English.
• We released new Grammar Guides and strengthened our partnership with PONS to provide you with detailed explanations directly linked to our grammar units.

October

• The Business Course became available for Spanish ¡Olé!

November

• We launched a new design to make your language learning experience even more intuitive and fun.
• We reached over 5 million users online and 5 million users via our mobile apps! That’s 10 million in total and we are still growing!
• busuu.com won the category ‘Best Education, Recruitment, Media StartUp’ at The Europas, the annual European Tech Startup Awards.

December

• With Arabic we added the fourth most spoken language of the world to our list and now offer 10 languages in total!

As you can see 2011 was a very successful and exciting year for us and hopefully also for you! Thank you again for all of the support and feedback you gave us during the year. What makes busuu.com special is our interactive community. Without you, we would not have reached all these milestones in 2011!

Stay tuned in 2012! We will surprise you with new exciting features pretty soon!