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LiveMocha today is unveiling a social network that attempts to connect people who want to learn a new language, a market that founder Shirish Nadkarni believes is worth $20 billion or more.
"It is growing rapidly due to globalization, immigration and travel, but it is a market that has seen very little innovation for the last decade," said Nadkarni, whose parents stressed learning English when he was growing up in India. He came up with the idea for LiveMocha because he wanted to pass the same lessons on to his children, who are learning Spanish.
Operating in stealth mode for the past eight months, LiveMocha is launching today at the DEMOfall conference in San Diego. It has raised just under $1 million from investors such as Sam Jadallah, Greg Stanger, Sunny Gupta and Raghav Kher.
More than 160 hours of instructional language exercises have been created by LiveMocha around English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, French and German. In addition to those exercises, it is hoping to link people within the community so that a native Spanish speaker -- for example -- could help a person in the U.S., China or Canada with grammar, conversation or writing. Members will be able to converse in real time via text or video chats, practicing the language with people of similar proficiency.
Currently, all of the content on the site is free. Beginning next year, the 12-person company plans to start charging $10 to $20 per month for more advanced four-month courses. It also plans to make money through online advertising as well as through an online tutoring marketplace where language experts could charge for their services.
Nadkarni, who described the company as "a global (peer to peer) network of language learners," worked at Microsoft for 12 years before founding mobile e-mail messaging startup TeamOn in 1999.
And he is not the only one looking at ways to create an online community where people can share their knowledge. Former drugstore.com and Amazon.com executive Kal Raman earlier this year unveiled infiLearn, a Bellevue Internet startup whose goal is to bring educational opportunities to people everywhere. The company is backed by Knowledge Universe and Ignition Partners.
LiveMocha is different since it is focusing exclusively on language courses, while infiLearn has a much broader focus, said Nadkarni. Other competitors include Berlitz -- which offers classroom-based language courses -- and Rosetta Stone -- which is best known for its CD-ROM titles. Language applications on Facebook -- like xLingo and iTalki -- also are potential threats since they have already launched online language exchanges.
But Nadkarni claims that LiveMocha is different because it combines online course materials with a community.
"We think a community-based approach really provides the foundation to really help people learn a language in a more effective fashion than just attending an online course or popping in a CD-ROM," he said.
Nadkarni doesn't plan to change the company's name, saying that it is a "fun name" that communicates the "interactive nature" of the business. It also allows the company to diversify the service over time.
But does the word "mocha" really resonate in China, India or Mexico?
"You would be surprised the extent to which Starbucks has popularized the term mocha in a number of different countries," he said.
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Posted by unregistered user at 9/24/07 2:56 p.m.
This company ignores the most fundamentally important aspect of learning a new language: being able to speak, face-to-face, with the instructor and classmates.
Even if they were to build a Netmeeting-type experience, it would still pale in comparison to a traditional classroom. Learning the pronunciation and tones of a new language is hard enough with real human contact. Imagine how hard it would be with headphones, a mike, and audio compression.
- Someone who takes a lot of language classes at BCC