The platform launched to the general public on June 19, 2012, at which point the waiting list had grown to around 500,000. Duolingo launched a private beta on November 27, 2011, and accumulated a waiting list of more than 300,000 people. In October 2011, Duolingo announced that it had raised $3.3 million from a Series A round of funding, led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from author Tim Ferriss and actor Ashton Kutcher's investing firm A-Grade Investments. This was replaced as a source of revenue by a Duolingo English Test certification program, advertising and subscription. An early revenue stream was as a crowdsourced translation service. The founders considered creating Duolingo as a nonprofit organization but Von Ahn judged this model as unsustainable. The project was originally sponsored by Luis von Ahn's MacArthur fellowship and a National Science Foundation grant. Swiss-born Hacker (co-founder and current CTO of Duolingo) believed that "free education will really change the world" and wanted to supply people an outlet to do so. A driving motivation was Von Ahn's upbringing in Guatemala, where he saw how expensive it was for people in his community to learn English. Von Ahn had sold his second company, reCAPTCHA, to Google and, with Hacker, wanted to work on something related to education. The idea for Duolingo was initiated at the end of 2009 in Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn and his post-graduate student Severin Hacker. Duolingo offers a premium service which eliminates advertising and offers more features.ĭuolingo also offers the Duolingo English Test certification program and a literacy app for children called Duolingo ABC. The company uses a freemium model with over 500 million registered users. It also includes a small variety of constructed languages. Duolingo offers over 100 total courses across 42 distinct languages, from Spanish, French, German and Japanese to Navajo and Yiddish. On its main app users can practice vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and listening skills using spaced repetition. Kotlin, Swift, React, Python, Scala, HTML, CSS, JavaScriptĭuolingo ( / ˌ dj uː oʊ ˈ l ɪ ŋ ɡ oʊ/ DEW-oh- LING-goh) is an American educational technology company which produces apps for language-learning and provides language certification. Online education, Professional certificationĢ7 November 2011 10 years ago ( ) (private beta)ġ9 June 2012 10 years ago ( ) (public release)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |