Congratulations to these members who’ve won a 1-month subscription to the SpeakENG course.

Eucilene     Brazil
Amanda     Brazil
Yingshine     China
Lucinda     China
Tony Feng     China
Lucky     China
Ahmed Elrazki     Egypt
Hery     Indonesia
Joy     China/Japan
Hamahamacchi     Japan
Queen Bees     Lebanon
CINTHYA     Peru
Ugly     Russia
Firuz     Tajikistan
Nao     Japan/USA
Sharanya India
Ozan Turkey
Sarah Iraq
Hasan Bangladesh

Winners should claim their prize by the 28th of September and then will have one month to use it.  Good luck to all the winners!  We have high hopes for your improved English ability and we look forward to hearing from you after you use this package.

For those of you who didn’t win, you can still buy the SpeakENG Online Course for either 1 year or 1 month.  Don’t forget the special introductory price of $16 for the 1-year course will be ending September 30.  So make sure you take advantage of the reduced rate and buy before the end of the month!

So this is your last chance to purchase the 1-Year SpeakENG Online Course for $16 USD!

If you know anyone who is studying English, please tell them to join italki and purchase it soon! The price for the same package starting in October will be $40 USD! Don’t miss out on this great opportunity!

If you don’t know much about the SpeakENG Online Course, you can read the description here. It’s important to remember that SpeakENG has two main parts:
1) Online Course: Multimedia lessons, English exercises, grammar explanations, roleplaying games, and much more. The courses run from beginner levels to advanced.
2) One-on-One Tutoring with a professional American teacher: Included with the 1-year online course is a 15 minute session with a professional US teacher. The teacher can answer any questions the student may have, in addition to structuring a one-on-one live teaching course. Students are encouraged to purchase additional teaching sessions.

Here is a sample video of what a SpeakENG online course looks like:

You can also view a short sample of a one-on-one tutoring session here.

We hope people studying English will take advantage of this promotional pricing! It is really a tremendous value that is hard to compare with.

Also, it’s the last chance to register for our sweepstakes the Great English Giveaway. We’re giving away 20 SpeakENG 1-month Online Courses, and all you have to do is post in that group. We’ll be choosing the winners on Monday. Go post now, and if you don’t win next week — make sure you purchase SpeakENG by the end of the month!

The italki team

In general, the process works like this.
When you go to purchase italki credits, you will have a new option labeled bank transfer.

After you select bank transfer, you will be asked to confirm the amount of italki credit to purchase, and which country is your bank in. The designated bank account will be different depending on the country, and this helps keep the bank transfer fees very low.

Then you will be taken to a screen that will show you the information you will need to transfer the money. This information will include the bank name, city, payee, SWIFT Code, country, and account number. Crucially it will also include a “Reference Number”. It is crucial that you include the Reference Number when you transfer the funds. This will ensure that your account on italki is credited properly.

With this information you should be able to do an online transfer from your bank’s website or go there in-person to transfer the money.

If you have any questions, you can check our help section on bank transfers.

We hope offering more payment options will allow more of our users to participate in the italki marketplace. If there’s a specific form of payment you would like to see on italki, please leave a comment or email feedback at italki dot com.

SpeakENG is an online course for learning English, and any italki member can win a 1-Month Subscription just by replying to this group post! The SpeakENG program includes access to the Online Course for a full month, plus a 15 minute session with Eleutian’s certified ESL teachers.

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What you need to do to enter the sweepstakes:

1) Log on to italki.com or join if you’re not already a member.

2) Go to The Great English Giveaway group post

3) Read the rules, and then reply to the post with three things:

• How you found out about italki
• Why you’re learning English
• A funny or embarrassing English mistake you have made

4) That’s it!

The contest will begin on September 8, 2009 at 12:01 am China Standard Time, and will end on September 20, 2009 at 11:59 pm China Standard Time.  italki will choose the winner before September 30th.  Full contest details are available here.

If you’re looking for other products to help you learn English, check out the italki Marketplace.

Good luck!

About Adam Jackson:

• Adam specializes in consumer internet companies, and has founded three companies.
• Founder of venture-backed DriverSide.com. Driverside helps people make better decisions about owning and maintaining their car.
• Founder of MarketSquare, a company to help consumers find locally produced products. Acquired by StepUp Commerce, which in turn was acquired by Intuit (INTU) in 2006.
• Advises Incentalign, Inc., a company which supports sales team optimization.
• Adam graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in Computer Science and Economics.

We’re excited to have Adam on our board of advisors, along with Porter Erisman and Tom Soohoo. We are a young company, and we really value the advice and help we get from these experienced entrepreneurs.

The italki Team

italki has a store at zazzle.com where you can customize tees and other products with the italki logo and the language you’re studying.  You can tell the world how much you love italki and what language you’re learning.  For example, one of our shirts says 我学习中文在 italki (which means “I’m studying Chinese at italki”).

Check out our storefront and start shopping now! http://www.zazzle.com/italki.  In fact, I think its time I start stocking up for winter and I really like the black italki sweatshirt…

The “Translate this page” link is located in the upper right-hand corner. When you click on it, it will open a new window or tab.  By opening the translate page side-by-side with the original site, you can refer back to the original page to get better understanding of the context.

The translate page is broken into three sections.
1. Phrases that haven’t been translated yet
2. Phrases that have translations submitted
3. Phrases that have been locked.
If you start at the top, you can start translating by just typing in the box and hitting enter or by clicking “Submit”. Don’t worry if you see phrases that don’t seem to be on the page — those are phrases that might be useful for other users.

All the phrases that have at least one translation are listed in the second section. If you see a translation that could be improved, you can click on “vote / fix”. You should be able to see a list of submitted translations. You can vote on the submitted translations or submit a translation of your own.

One thing about crowdsourcing changes to a website is that there is a time delay before having a fully translated site. This is particularly true as we’ve made a lot of changes to the site in the past few months. As new features come online, more and more translations need to be updated. We realize that it is inconvenient to deal with a site that isn’t fully translated (or translated well), and we hope you’ll help us get the site ready in your language. We will periodically merge the changes to the main site.

Finally, since we are using English as the base language for the website, if you run into bad English on the site, please let us know through our feedback or through email (feedback at italki). We want to avoid having errors translated throughout the site.

Thanks again! We really believe that italki is a product of our community, so we want to thank you in advance for all of your help.

The italki team

cashU from Maktoob

We’re excited to announce that we’ve now started accepting payments through cashU. cashU is a popular payment service that is used in many countries where credit card payments are not accepted. In the Middle East, for example, credit cards are not often used online due to fraud and security concerns. However, cashU has payment options such as prepaid scratch cards that are a secure method for handling online payments.

Roughly 15% of italki users come from the Middle East, and we hope that by expanding their payment options that more users will be able to participate in the language marketplace.

Prepaid Cards

cashU is part of the Maktoob Group, which operates one of the Arabic region’s leading portals (Maktoob.com). cashU is offered in 28 countries around the world, including the Middle East, China and some European countries.

We’re planning to add more payment options in the near future, and we’ll let you know about those here on the blog.

Arabic Press Release (PDF)

The italki team

Being part of Microsoft Bizspark has helped us a lot. Through Bizspark, we’ve gotten access to the entire range of Microsoft development tools, from products like Visual Studio to licenses for SQL Server databases. Database licenses, in particular, can be a heavy cost for startups (Bizspark licenses can be used for production servers), and this has certainly helped us keep our burn rate low. Unfortunately, some companies in China do not pay for software licenses, and this reflects a larger problem with intellectual property here, including movies, TV shows, music, books, and more.

Getting ourselves on Bizspark was easy, and for that, we also have to thank our hosting provider, Rackspace. We’ve been really impressed the service they provide. Running a development center far away from the servers themselves can be tough, and having a strong partner for managed hosting has made our lives much easier.

The italki Team

Alipay

Learning English is the primary goal of most users on italki, which is natural given that the majority of users are not native speakers of English. Our largest group of users come from China (20% of total users). We’ve just started a marketing partnership with Alipay to make it easier for Chinese users to purchase italki credits.
Alipay is a payment platform owned by the global e-commerce company Alibaba. Alipay works similarly to Paypal, and is very popular in China. For the month of August, we are offering a 10% bonus to purchases of italki credits over $30 USD through Alipay.

Learning English in China

Alipay - italki page

We hope that by making it easier for Chinese users to pay online, this will lead to more transactions on the italki marketplace. There is certainly an immense demand for learning English in China. Chinese students start learning English at an early age (depends regionally, but average age of 10-13). However, after studying English for five years or more, many students graduate with “哑巴英文” (mute English). They often have not had any opportunity to use their English, and the vast majority are taught by Chinese teachers with varying levels of proficiency.

Given the demand for English, English training centers in China are a huge industry. These centers often are very expensive (10,000 – 20,000 RMB or ~$1500-$3000 USD). This amount of money also needs to be viewed in an economic context where the average monthly salary is roughly between $200 – $600 USD (depends on the city and region).

Anecdotally, we’ve been told that many Chinese find their experiences at these teaching centers to be disappointing. The centers are strong at marketing, but weak at delivering real improvement for students. Students have very limited access to teachers and are stuck listening in large classes.

Naturally, we believe that online learning can change this equation radically. italki partners, like Eleutian, can deliver an online product (SpeakENG), direct to students at an incredibly low costs. Students can get Eleutian’s certified teachers or find independent teachers which they can schedule according to their own time needs. In addition, student tuition doesn’t go into supporting building rents in expensive city districts, massive marketing campaigns, or large school administrations. Given the natural benefits of online learning, we think this will become a major alternative to offline learning in the near future.

View the English press release (PDF)
View the Chinese press release (PDF)

The italki Team