I am happy to announce that we have confirmed two new speakers for our event on Multilingualism in Europe, in London on September 17: Niss Jonas Carlsson and Mait Müntel.
Niss Jonas Carlsson is the founder of the Swedish language learning company Brainglass, established in 2002. Brainglass was founded with the aim to change the way we learn languages, by adding personalisation.
In 2011 Brainglass launched its first mobile application called Karaoke4English on iOS and Android. Today the company’s mobile applications, including Lingoal, have surpassed 1 million downloads and combine the concepts of audiobook, e-book, dictionary and exercises into one engaging learning environment.
Based on his experiences with language students and immigrants in Sweden, Carlsson will focus on the topic of “Language challenges in Europe: Minorities, Migration and Motivation” during his presentation at the event.
The second speaker I would like to introduce today is Mait Müntel, the co-founder and CEO of Lingvist, a language learning startup from Estonia and part of the Techstars London 2014 cohort.
Lingvist wants to help you learn any language in 200h by the means of applying big data and mathematical concepts to the learning process and therefore reducing the time needed to learn a new language by 90%.
The idea for Lingvist was born out of personal need. Müntel was looking for language learning applications when he wanted to learn French but none of the existing solutions fit his needs.
“I had always wanted to learn new languages, but never had the time to do so. All the existing language learning tools tend to be inefficient and so I decided to build my own. I tried the prototype on myself and it took me only 200 hours to learn French, which I took as a sign that I’m onto something remarkable.”
Mait is a particle physicist and an entrepreneur. He received a PhD in Theoretical Physics in 2008 and has extensive expertise in mathematical modeling and programming research software. Müntel contributed to the development of BalticGrid.org, a distributed computing network for the Baltic Sea region and was part of the Higgs boson research team at CERN, Switzerland.