Lipstream brings voice to Englishtown.com - Brief Article

Internet Strategies for Education Markets: The Heller Report, Feb, 2000

This month, EF Education (www.ef.com), a language education organization with 2,000 office employees, nearly 14,000 teachers across the globe, and $500 million in revenues, will launch Englishtown.com. The new site is a merger of the one-year old Englishlive.com and a two-year old site also known as Englishtown.com. The service offers students of English live, voice communications for tuition-based, instructor-led courses. The site also includes numerous free areas to practice their skills. The Englishtown.com web site is run by an EF subsidiary called Englishtown.com.

Lipstream's PC to PC, live voice over the Internet is the driver of the new site. Bill Fisher, Englishtown.com president, says the company has researched web-based telephony for nearly four years. Fisher regards live voice and native-speaking instructors as essential to language learning. EF Education has long run classroom-based language courses, but the need for native speaking instructors limits the scalability of that model. China, for example, has 300 million students of English according to Fisher. He points out that it is impossible to get the requisite 10 million teachers into the country. Voice on the web will enable the company to take an even firmer hold on what they estimate to be a $40 to $60 billion a year global market.

"Without this technology, we don't have a service," says Fisher. He says that Englishtown.com initially pursued a proprietary voice interface, dropped that plan and started shopping. They first worked with a company that had a low-level voice application, says Fisher, but that company then shifted their attention to classroom-based corporate training. Then, says Fisher, Englishtown.com happened upon Lipstream. Lipstream, said Fisher, had the most readily available thin client solution. Given the low-end computers of many students across the world, an approach which required only a small program resident on the user's PC was imperative.

Users simply download an ActiveX control, which means they don't have to open the download to install it. They are up and running in about a minute, says Fisher. The client is so thin, he adds, it doesn't do a lot of what they really want it to do--but it is a good start. He says that Lipstream will be enriching its product by working with companies that have videoconferencing, shared whiteboard and shared browsing products.

Englishtown.com buys the voice service from Lipstream with a simultaneous user license, and Lipstream hosts the voice.

Fisher expects Englishtown.com to rapidly become a larger business than the classroom-based business of EF Education. EF teaches over 400,000 students every year from sales offices and schools in 60 countries. Fisher says the existing internal sales force paired with the strong brick and mortar presence will allow Englishtown.com to scale up rapidly. The early phases of the web site have thus far attracted 3,500 users and some corporate accounts. The individual consumer is the key market

Tuition, which runs from $50 to $150 per course, is the primary revenue driver. Free areas of the site do carry ads for additional revenue, but that is not a model of great interest to Fisher. In addition to using the EF sales force, the site is reaching customers through regional portal deals in which Englishtown.com's free community services reside on the portal.

EF Education, which has been a privately held company since 1965, plans to bring the Englishtown.com subsidiary public this year. Meanwhile, Englishtown.com is fully funded through the parent company. Englishtown.com is currently the only education company using Lipstream technology, says a Lipstream company spokesperson.