busuu.com | the language learning community

busuu.com wins Innovators’ Pitch at CeBIT

bernhard — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:14:53 +0000

We are very happy to announce that busuu.com just won the Innovators’ Pitch at CeBIT! The CeBIT fair is the world’s foremost tradeshow for the digital industry, celebrated every year in Hanover, Germany. The Innovators’ Pitch is organized every year by BITKOM, Germany´s Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media. This very prestigious prize rewards young and innovative companies – and this year, busuu.com was selected among more than 80 applications as the winner in the Business to Consumer category!

This again shows the highly disruptive and innovative potential of busuu.com which has been awarded already several times.

Again, we would like to dedicate this prize to our users who help us day by day to create such a wonderful community for learning languages! Thanks a lot and hopefully there are more awards to come! ;-)

busuu.com adds Portuguese online course and receives substantial funding!

July — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:38:25 +0000

Today we from busuu.com have two reasons to celebrate:

First, we are happy to announce that we have closed our first financing round with an Austrian business angel. The important six-figure investment will be used to further expand our language learning platform and grow our international user base.

This is an important step in the history of our Start-Up and we are very pleased to have found the right partner who shares our vision to revolutionize the way people learn languages!

Second, from now on you can learn Brazilian Portuguese on busuu.com! We offer an interactive language course in Brazilian Portuguese completely for free.

You can now get access to more than 150 learning units on 4 different levels and practice your language skills directly with Portuguese native speakers of our community!

In order to start with your free Brazilian Portuguese course, go to your settings page and add Portuguese to the languages you want to learn. Then you can immediately access your courses by clicking on your new Brazilian Portuguese tree in your language garden!

So today the whole busuu.com team is going to celebrate with some Caipirinhas! ;-) But stay tuned, more languages and exciting new features are going to be added soon!

Improved navigation on busuu.com!

July — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:21:52 +0000

We have improved our navigation within the vocabulary learning part – now it´s even simpler to browse through our language learning material! Please have a look at the new navigation short-cuts:

This is how it works:

To go to the following image, press the right arrow
To go to the previous image, press the left arrow
To play the audio of the vocabulary, press the up arrow
To play the audio of the key phrase, press the down arrow (only available if your are a premium member)
To mark this word for your personal vocabulary list, press enter

We hope you will enjoy this new feature and we are convinced that it will further speed up your language learning progress!

busuu.com among the top 5 in the BBVA Open Talent Competition

July — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:24:43 +0000

We are very glad to announce that busuu.com has been ranked number 5 out of more than 400 projects within the Spanish BBVA Open Talent Competition. This prestigious competition rewards innovative internet start-ups.

We have received more than 6,000 votes and therefore we want to thank you all for your amazing support!

To see the results of the voting, please have a look at the BBVA ranking page!

Among the last 20 finalists, 3 winners will be now selected by a jury! Please keep your fingers crossed, we will update you about the results on this blog!

New review types and customizable tests available on busuu.com

bernhard — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:40:48 +0000

We are continuously improving our language learning platform and today we have launched some great new functionalities.

First of all, we have added two new review types to our exams. Apart from the 5 existing ways to test your language skills you will now find a review type where you have to create a word out of several letters (like in Scrabble). Additionally, there is a second new review type where you have to match phrases with the correct translation. Please find below screen shots of the new review types:

Create a word: Match the phrases:

With this interactive and complete language exams, busuu.com will test your vocabulary knowledge, your writing skills, your listening comprehension and your understanding of the syntax. All this in currently five different languages comprising more than 3,500 vocabularies in each of those languages.

Additionally, we offer now the possibility to create your own customized review! This great new functionality is only available if you are a premium user.

You now have the possibility to create your own individual test by choosing the content and the review type you want. You first decide to be tested either on specific units, on your mistakes or on your marked vocabulary. You then choose among our 7 different review types.

With this new functionality you train only specific skills according to your individual needs! You find your customizable review in your language area - try it out now!

We are convinced that those new tools will further boost your language skills! Stay tuned, more exciting features are about to be launched very soon!