Another approach to make the world a better and more communicative place: Lingueo.com, a marketplace for learning languages with teachers coming from all over the world. Lingueo uses a video conferencing system based on a social network – there are public pages where teachers introduce themselves with videos courses as advertising. Tiburon-TV's Viktoria met with Lingueo’s founders Arnaud Portanelli, Johann Querne and Guillaume le Dieu de Ville at the Palais de Tokyo – a pretty impressive art space in Paris (the current exhibition „Hotel Everland“ with its mix of electricity, new technology and art gives the interview a unique background sound)
Arnaud finds that „to offer language exchange for free doesn’t work out“, so they created Lingueo like a marketplace where users can choose the price depending on the quality level of the teacher. Prices of one-to-one classes start as low as €10 per hour - students only pay for the time they spend in the course room with the first five minutes being for free. Founder Guillaume points out: „Right now we offer 36 languages – among them regional languages - with 600 tutors coming from more than 60 countries. Courses can be taken any time, any place.“ All tutors are labeled and rated both by the founders and the students at the end of each course. Everybody who has an internet connection, a browser and a webcam can sign up on Lingueo, there is nothing additional to download.
Lingueo is only online since three months and already experiences a high level of loyalty from its customers according to Johann. He announces that 2009 will be „the year of communication, where we evangelize the service as much as we can.“ Arnaud adds: „We are going to fight to ensure the best quality of our website.“
Make sure to watch the video until the very end: Pretty Viktoria is wearing a black curly wig while the Lingueo „boygroup“ is performing „the Champs-Elysées song“;)