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Educational Software - Friday, October 2, 2009

Google Invests in EnglishCentral for Jap > Eng Language Study

Lexington, MA's EnglishCentral, which run an English learning website for the Asian market, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Atlas Venture and Google Ventures.

The startup's founder and CEO is Alan Schwartz, who worked 12 years in speech recognition at AT&T Labs, SpeechWorks and Nuance. He most recently led Nuance's Mobile & Automotive business as VP & GM and worked in Nuance's Japan offices where he developed the interest in English Central.

EnglishCentral sells 24/7 English-language practice for native Japanese speakers. “We describe ourselves as YouTube meets Rosetta Stone meets Guitar Hero,” said CEO Schwartz. Revenue will come from subscriptions, but the company is offering a free introductory service on a freemium model. It currently allows visitors to study English by watching videos with subtitles The site has yet to launch its paid offering.

While we think that English Central is a strong name, they will be frustrated as there is another English Central with .net suffix that comes up higher on Google searches.

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