Brave new world I attended a breakfast meeting and conference this morning on new developments in the use of cellular phones and computers in Japan. A representative of KDDI , a leading Japanese telecommunications company, spoke of the expanding market for 3G or third generation cellular phones. These phones have an ever increasing range of functions. KDDI is second largest company in terms of cell phone subscribers in Japan with 30 million subscribers. DoCoMo with over 50 million subscribers is number one in the market. However, KDDI is the leader in 3G phones sold under their brand name "Au", which also happens to be the chemical symbol for the element "gold". Cell phones as the hub of Internet connectivity The speaker stressed that KDDI had been very successful in the consumer market and was now targeting the corporate market. The speaker talked of Web 3.0 as a new use of the Internet, whereby not only the users participate, as is the case in Web 2.0, but a range of powerful applications, including business applications, are available on cell phones via the Internet. Typically every employee has a cell phone. In KDDI's vision the cell phone was going to become the key tool for corporate as well as personal internet applications. As I listened to this presentation I had several thoughts. Obviously we, at The Linguist, need to make some of our content and functions available on cell phones. Japan may be the leader in cell phone development, but other countries will not be far behind. I believe this will be important to our future. We need to think through which applications are best exported to a cell phone. This will be a priority once we have our new system up and running.
Web 3.0 The Linguist is already a powerful language learning application which has aspects of Web 2.0 already built in. By that I mean that our members are not just passive users of The Internet. We have learners and tutors participating and interacting with each other. We are utilizing content created by unrelated bloggers and podcasters. All of this interaction on the Internet will be even more dynamic in the new system. In the new system our members will have the chance to learn many languages from dynamic and interesting content that can be selected based on their vocabulary level. Our members are already creating their own blogs and podcasts. The convivial learning community that I envisaged in my book, The Linguist, is becoming more and more of a reality. The new Linguist community will be an example of a Web 3.0 application as referred to by the KDDI representative.
We, at The Linguist, need to continue to get better. We appreciate any advice we receive from our members on website design or new functions for our system. We have been incorporating some of these ideas into the present Linguist system, and will do so for the new system. Please continue to tell us what you think.
Corporate language learning We, like KDDI, also want to do more for corporate language learners. We think that the return on investment in language learning for a corporation is far higher using The Linguist than in traditional grammar-based language learning. I have recently written three White Papers on subjects that relate to language learning on the Internet, corporate language learning, and standard tests like TOEIC, TOEFL and IELTS. You may want to have a look.
White Papers: · The Internet-THE Best Place to Learn English http://www.thelinguist.com/front/articles/the_best_place_to_learn_english.jsp · Business English: New Approaches are Needed to Increase the ROI in Corporate English Learning http://www.thelinguist.com/front/articles/business_english_learning.jsp · The importance of TOEIC, TOEFL, and IELTS.
http://www.thelinguist.com/front/articles/TOEIC_TOEFL_IELTS_importance.jsp
