Hi there,

How are you? we are launching today a couple of new features in palabea. We hope that you will enjoy them!
There are two new forums available.
- One forum is placed inside the virtual classrooms for discussing  the language topic of your choice
- The other forum is the general forum, is in the green tab on the top of each palabea page
In this general forum, you will be able to discuss any topics you  might want. Cinema, music, weather…etc.
If you wish to open a new topic for conversation, feel free to do so.
And if you´d like to start your own forum, please contact us, and  you will become the admin of your  forum.

Support us and win:

A crazy weekend (4 days) in wonderful Berlin!! for you your favorite special friend!!!

The winners will be invited to come and meet palabea´s team, they will receive state honors and will stay at the home of the founders!!!, and ….a superb party with palabea´s „International Relations“ shiny happy staff, who will guide you …into Berlin´s cool underworld There will be a final awesome surprise too.)

We want to document all of this, so you can show it to your friends (and so will we :P),so we´ll shoot a little nice movie with the highlights of these unforgettable days. Of course!; we´ll upload it to our community videos:)

We are really grateful for your support!

Thank you!

The palabea team

Hi there!

How are you? In this post, I just would like to thank all of you for your continuous support!  Your feedbacks are really appreciated.
It makes us really happy to see that you enjoy palabea, and that you are intereted in improving the platform.

We are always open to new  suggestions.  All of your ideas are taken into consideration by our team, since palabea is the platform for everyone willing to discover other cultures through language learning.

Thats why we are so grateful for your feedbacks and your active collaboration in palabea. Thanks to your feedbacks, our ideas for developing palabea keep growing and growing.. : ) way to go!

Thank you very much!

Hola!

Qué tal? En este mensaje me gustaría agradeceros el apoyo que nos estáis dando. Realmente estamos muy contentos de los feedbacks que recibimos. Saber que os gusta palabea es muy importante para nuestra motivación. Así mismo los feedbacks que nos enviáis para darnos a conocer algún pequeño fallo, nos sirve mucho ya que nos ahorra tiempo.

Pensamos que palabea debe ser una plataforma para todos los que se interesan en aprender lenguas y también en conocer otras culturas y personas. Por eso, os animamos a que segáis colaborando con nosotros de esta manera tan activa.Así nuestras ideas para desarrollar palabea se multiplican y multiplican : )!

Gracias y un saludo!!

El equipo de palabea

the palabea team

Elevator Pitch: Palabea’s vision for world peace, via language learning

Jemima Kiss / Elevator Pitch / Social networking

Partnering with, amongst others, German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, the language learning site Palabea.net launched in October 2007 and opened fully in May. It claims 50,000 users since it opened its online doors to language students, inviting them to take part in everything from virtual classroom sessions to video tutorials and social discussions.

The Berlin-based project employs 13 people from six countries and is backed by a handful of business angels, but that hasn’t stopped it working with an impressive array of partners from the BBC to Cultura Italiana and the Language Project in Bristol.

Co-founder and chief executive Sebastian Schkudlara introduces the project.

Sebastian Schkudlara

• Explain your business to my Mum.
“People learn and teach languages while meeting people from over the world.”

• How do you make money?
“Recognised educational providers pay us - they have access to be part of a web 2.0 social network and get benefits of interacting with their target audience.

• What’s your background?
“Sebastian has worked in Zanox, an internet company for affiliate marketing. Patricia [Sierra, the co-founder] was a marketing coordinator in a promotional marketing agency in Madrid, Spain, and later she worked in a language school in Berlin as a teacher and creating educational content.”

• How are personalisation and recommendation part of your business?
“It’s one of the most important points in our business. Personalisation and recommedations are an integral part of Palabea as they function to ensure that we offer the best service to our users.”

• What’s your biggest challenge?
“The ongoing challenge is to develop unique features to make Palabea a pioneering learning experience.”

• Name your closest competitors.
“Livemocha.”

• Any weird business experiences so far?
“Meeting business people who don’t care about the idea - only the numbers. We have to synthesise our vision in figures.”

• Are we in the middle of a new dot com bubble?
“It’s only a bubble for unoriginal projects, and of course also for investors trusting business models that really aren’t very innovative. They can really suffer in the congested online world. ?
“However, the bubble is not really harming for creative and pioneering dot coms which cooperate and network with complementary businesses. In fact, such original ideas can take advantage of the situation to keep on growing.”

• How many users do you have now, and what’s your target within 12 months?
“We have 53,000 users and every day we register between 700 and 1000 more. If we keep growing as consistently as we are now, we’ll no doubt have 1 million users in one year. ”

• Which tech businesses or web thinkers are the ones to watch?
“Martin Varsavsky, Ron Packard, Yossi Vardi.”

• Where do you want the company to be in five years?
“We want to extend Palabea offline, into the real world. Our goal is to facilitate language learning in order to create an intercultural dialogue. While learning a language, the users get to understand other cultures and learn essential values like tolerance and multiculturalism.”

palabea.net

Read more:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/

Hi there!

We are very happy to announce that people from 190 countries/territories are now enjoying palabea.net!

Thanks,

The palabea team

Hi there!

How are you? I would like to inform you about the scrabble tournament:

COULD YOU BE THE BEST POLYGLOT SCRABBLE PLAYER IN THE WORLD ?

This tournament for the brightest polyglots to ‘lock horns’ is being held in sunny Spain in October/November. It’s a Scrabble game with a difference where competitors will be allowed to play in many languages at the same time, and score extra points for each different languages they use.

There will be a prize of US $2000 to the best player. The tournament is being organised as part of the celebrations of the 60th Anniversary of Scrabble and the world’s press will attend, so the Champion’s fame will be spread far and wide.

If you are interested in taking part please email Philip Nelkon on scrabbleuk@mattel.com by 23 June with your contact details, your nationality and if different, a note of the country that you would want to represent (travel and accommodation expenses will be paid.)

Thank you very much and Best RegardsThe palabea team

Hi all,

How are you?

Developing a multicultural dialogue is very important to us, and now thanks to your help, it’s possible in the speaking world.

Feedback

If you didn’t receive an activation link, please let us know by emailing: support@palabea.com

Every minute we receive lots of new registered users, so there might be a delay in responding.

Thanks for your continuing support.

Best wishes

The palabea team

Hi all,

We’d like to thank you for taking part in the opening!

We’re really pleased with the response we’ve had from all the new people who have joined the palabea community.

Feedback:

We’ve learnt that there were some technical issues in the first few moments of opening the platform to do with spam comments, however, we quickly resolved this issue. Thank you for letting us know of this inconvenience.

We hope you enjoyed the opening, and continue to improve your language skills with your new friends.

All the best

The palabea team

We’re happy about your participation in the beta phase. To send a little gratitude back your way,

we would like to invite you to palabea´s Grand Opening on Tuesday, May 27^th.

After six months of operation, we will launch the palabea site into its next challenging stage.

Please. tell us what you think about it. And thanks again for your continuing support.

Best Regards

The palabea team

Hi,

We are looking for user testimonials about palabea. If you would like to help us, we would be happy to receive a few written sentences about your palabea experiences.

Please send your feedback to: info@palabea.com

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Best wishes,

The palabea team

Hi,
We’ve just opened palabea groups in facebook, myspace and twitter with the aim of getting to know more people interested in learning languages. So if you have an account in those virtual communities, you can add palabea as a friend at the following addresses:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7620607086

http://www.myspace.com/palabea

https://twitter.com/palabea

Thanks for your continuing support!

The palabea team