Babbel launched today (TechCrunch, my write-up on ZDNet) and it’s a very good looking rich Internet application. The team chose to use Flex to build it so I sent Thomas Holl, one of the founders of the company, a few questions about the team, why they chose Flex and what’s in store for the future.
1. Why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about the company?
I am Thomas Holl. My professional background is mainly in computer science and in consulting. After several years in the audio software development I worked as a management consultant for IT for quite a time until I founded the Babbel team with 3 partners in Mai 2007. The idea of Babbel as playful but effective vocabulary-developing and sentence-building application for language learning was born in late 2006. The team was already conspiring at that time so it took us little time to quit our jobs and get going.
My partners are all experienced professionals in various fields. Toine Diepstraten and I know each other since student times. He is one of the best application developers I know and he has additional experience in web development with Ruby on Rails. Managing Director of Product Design and Finance Lorenz Heine was a co-founder and CFO of Native Instruments and has extensive entrepreneurial experience in the software industry. Markus Witte, Managing Director of Marketing and Content, has not only extensive online marketing and management experience but also an academic grounding in language, cultural theory and media. Ulrike Kerbsatat is our first employee and works at Babbel as Content Manager. She holds a Master’s degrees in language instruction and interpreting, and is fluent in German, English and French.
In August 2007, we founded Lesson Nine, the company behind Babbel in Berlin, Germany. The venture is completly independent and is currently entirely funded by the four owners.
The public beta phase of Babbel started today and the feedback is overwhelming: thousand users joined within the first twelf hours. We are looking forward to future developments.
2. It’s a very media-intensive site, but what made you choose Flex over other RIA technologies?
Basically we found Flash to be the best technology available for playing sounds and graphic effects. As of last year, there simply wasn’t an alternative to the Flex framework that seemed suitable for the vision we have for Babbel. We might have been able to do a lot of the things in AJAX, but then there would have been a lot of JavaScript libraries to handle and still the user experience could not compare with a Flash application. That in combination with the penetration of the flash player as well as the professional IDE/ documentation and a vivid developer community were the main reasons to rely on Flex.
3. You said you’re planning on migrating to Flex 3, what’s the ETA for that?
We will start migrating our code base as soon as the SDK will be available as a final version. First tests with the new SDK were good, although we have to work out some minor bugs.
4. What attracted you to the foreign language niche?
The idea for Babbel was inspired by the observation that there are very few good electronic language learning aids: The available online vocabulary trainers are quite simple and not very user-friendly. The multimedia applications you can buy on CD-ROM and DVD are not only pretty expensive but also quite often not up to date. Learning games on consoles are kind of role model for the Babbel concept because these simple applications are fun to use and they are vastly popular. They have a modern user interface and trigger ambition. Finally, there are huge advantages we could gain in using internet technology for an e-learning application.
5. Why do you think a rich Internet application is a valuable way to learn a new language?
Babbel applications aim at the ambition and the entertainment of the users similar to these console games: When you do some exercises on a regular basis, there will be a significant learning progress that can be measured and compared at any time. And if that is not motivation enough, you will automatically be reminded about the pensum that you set for yourself. Most of all, you can learn together with others, compare with them, use what you’ve just learned in an online conversation. This is the advantage of an online application: people from all over the world can find each other easily and communicate seamlessly if the are interested. But communication is not the only form of participation on an internet appication makes possible. Users can also generate content on their own and thus add more diversity.
6. What were some of the plusses and minuses that your team ran in to while using Flex?
The plus side is that it is a really stable framework, crafted by some obvious skilled developers. You can prototype ideas quite easily and fast, although the edit-compile-run cycle can be annoying if working on a bigger project. Thats why we developed some form of “runtime MXML” for several areas within babbel. Memory footprint and optimzing it can give you a hard time, so the Flex 3 profiler came in just-in-time for us. We ran into strange exceptions with flash player < 9.0.45, but the flash player updates fixed these problems.
7. How do you see rich Internet applications evolving over the year?
The majority of websites in our market is currently AJAX-based and includes Flash only where sound or video functionality is needed. With the Flex framework and the new Flash projector applications beeing available and most of all with a growing number of developers available, more and more of the user interfaces will become Flash applications with a growing scope of functionality.
8. What are your future plans for Babbel.com ?
We will push our language learning tools quite a lot further towards a game-like user experience. Chat and grammar lessons are the next features we have on the plate. Then there is a host of functionality in terms of networking and community features we want to add. Also the content management for our in-house team as well as the possibilities four our users to contribute have to be vastly expended. Finally, we are thinking about porting Babbel for mobile appliances and gaming consoles.
[tags]Flex, Babbel, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]
The 
Rafe Needleman over at WebWare