MochaTalk

Livemocha launched last week at DEMOfall in San Diego. Demo is a premier conference with a great reputation for showcasing the latest startup technology. You get essentially 6 minutes to make a brief yet compelling pitch to the audience which consists primarily of press, VCs and established companies like Microsoft, Qualcomm etc. who are hunting for promising new technologies. It took an amazing amount of time and numerous re-writes to put this together but the end result I think was pretty good (well, maybe you be the judge). We kicked off the demo with a video clip from one of my favorite movies “Lost in Translation”. There’s this classic scene where Bill Murray is filming a video for Santuri Time Whiskey and is getting harangued by the director who is speaking to him Japanese. But the only scraps of translation that he gets from the interpreter is “He wants you turn and look in camera”. We used this video to illustrate in a funny way the increasing importance of acquiring foreign language proficiency in this increasingly global world that we live in. Here’s a link to our DEMO presentation so you can see how it all came together.

DEMO turned out to be a great event for us. We were featured as one of the top 5 applications on Day 1 of demo. We also got a great press coverage in a number of major publications and blogs such as USA Today, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Webware, VentureBeat, Mashable etc. What’s great is that these stories were then picked up by a large number of bloggers who then wrote about Livemocha as well. It is truly amazing how the PR game has changed since I did the PR launch for TeamOn in 2000. At that time, the only coverage you could hope for was the coverage that you got from the major print and online publications. However, it was very difficult to create the kind of “buzz” that you can get today in the blogosphere without much proactive effort on your part.

Thanks to all the PR and blog coverage, we have had a great first 2 weeks in terms of registrations. What’s amazing is that 60% of our users are coming from overseas which is exactly what we were hoping for. Some of our biggest countries include Germany, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Canada and the UK. Clearly, there’s a real demand for foreign language learning all over the world. The other interesting data point is the high level of engagement of our users. People are spending a significant amount of time on our site and submitting a large number of exercises (writing and speaking) for review by others and getting helpful feedback from native language speakers.

While we have a lot of work still ahead of us to continue to improve the site and make it even more relevant and useful to our users, it has been very gratifying to get a number of kudos from our users:

• Just wanted to let you know, this is the most valuable website I’ve ever used. It’s just phenomenal! (Fargo, ND, USA.)
• Hi! First I’d like to say…amazing site! …that said, I’d like to request adding Finnish to your languages list. Personally, I’m a native speaker and wouldn’t mind this being known to anyone who might want to learn the language. (Finland)
• I’m so excited about Livemocha. I’m an experienced Italian and Spanish native speaker and teacher. I’ve been traveling to many countries around the world and, due to my huge interest in knowing people and other cultures, I needed and loved to learn the most important way to human knowledge: language. In my case I speak five foreign languages that allows me to share feelings, emotions, thoughts, dreams and information with fantastic people all around the globe. The way I learned English, Portuguese ( fluently ) and Romanian, French ( elementar ) is quite simple: 1) motivation and will to communicate with interesting people 2) massive listening to, talking to, reading and asking for native speaker’s help 3) I found wonderful people to patiently teach me. With such experience, I started to teach what I knew to others and now with Livemocha this will be fun and easy.(Marconisida, Italy)

Thanks for all your feedback! We are carefully noting the feedback that a number of you have provided and our team is working hard to incorporate your suggestions as quickly as possible.

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