 Okay, we're back inside the Cube, live in San Francisco, California, at Node Summit here. Day two, Node Jam, all the startups are out there talking to the investors in the crowd, showing them their apps built on Node. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE.com, SiliconANGLE.tv, and this is the Cube. This is where we broadcast live. I'm here with Ben Lowenstein and Robert Daphouse. Daphouse, if you're a hockey player, you'll know the name. Played with George Gay from Canada, as you said earlier. Okay, and what's your company name? So we are Colingo. Colingo, not to be confused with Colinga, which is the town on Route 101. No, that would definitely be unfortunate. Okay, so welcome to the Cube, guys. So what's the vibe here? Tell us what you guys are doing here and your product and company. Absolutely, so we are Colingo and we are solving the problem of intermediate English learners worldwide. And this is a problem that's not well understood here in the US, but this is not like you or I who needs to go and learn the basics of French because we want to go out to a nice dinner and impress someone, or we want to know a little bit of Italian for the trip that we have to Italy. We're dealing with people who need English because it makes the difference of getting the job or not getting the job, but being able to seize opportunities or not seizing opportunities. And so we have a real time online tutoring marketplace where learners can come and we match them up with tutors for very advanced, very focused language tutoring sessions that get straight to the bottom of the problems that prevent them from being fluent. So, honestly, we're huge. We have a project we're working on called Silicon Academy, which is kind of like our open source projects just getting off the ground. We know about Khan Academy. We hear about Code Academy, just good funding. So online learning is changing. This isn't just like online course where it's a different paradigm of learning. So is that where you guys are going in here and how does the product work? Do people opt in? Is it crowdsourced? How is your platform working? Absolutely. So we're really focused on how we can take someone from the United States, an average American who has one thing that really matters to learners abroad, which is the intuitive ability to listen and to help someone practice their English and matching them with our tool set and our technology that enables them to become a really great language tutor and to be able from the comfort of their home with basically no experience to be an awesome tutor that can really help a learner get to the very specific problems that prevent them from fluency. So it's a marketplace. So that's the primary business model. So you have to match buyers and sellers, all that good stuff, kind of like match.com for English. But so there's some tech involved, right? You're dealing with video, dealing with audio. Yeah, we're actually dealing with audio and Robert can talk more about that, our director of engineering. Yes, and Node was an obvious choice for this project because it's a very real time base. There's a lot of interaction going on. When that learner is on the system with the tutor, there's a lot of information going back and forth. Node was an obvious choice for that. And we were also dependent on some third party APIs such as Twilio. So Node is really good for kind of sitting in the middle of all this stuff going on in real time. So what about video? Is there video involved? Not at the moment, there's not no. Just audio. Yes. So is it a window with chat and video? Yeah, so actually we also leverage Skype in this because Skype is a great communications channel. So the learner and the tutor are actually connected over Skype. But once that happens, that just kind of sits in the background and then they go over to their browsers and the actual lesson, the actual conversation itself, all that value happens in the browser. So we had Voxer on earlier. They're doing a lot of that, you know, the instant messaging with the voice. We asked about Skype. And so what does it work? What does it mean to work with Skype? To my knowledge, Skype doesn't really deal with Node or Skype just wrapping around Skype. How do you handle the Skype thing? Exactly, we're doing what you just said. We wrap around Skype. So Skype has released it's in a beta phase, essentially a runtime where you can build your own UI around Skype. And we are leveraging that in our system. And it was just a natural choice, like I said, to use Skype because they do have some great features in their network that we don't really have to worry about. You know, they just deliver a good call. Great, so where are you guys now? Tell us about the company status. Funded, angel funded, not funded, looking for funding, how many people? Sure. Where are you guys at? So we're three people right now. My co-founder Lee Jacobs, myself and Robert. Full time, we're looking to hire one more. That's actually why we're here at Node Conference. And if there's anyone in this audience that is a Node developer and would like to come work on some awesome challenges, please get in touch with us. So we were talking last night about this person you're trying to hire. It's a tough hire, right? It's a JavaScript person. Just describe the person you're looking for. So we're really looking for someone who has the ability to think in an architectural sense about Node. Who wants to take Node from kind of a basic hacking on it, we can make something work application to an application that's really well-structured, well-tested, something that's very smooth, very robust, and can link in with a lot of the external APIs such as Skype that we're working with. So where are you guys at with the product now? Is it actually working with some folks using it, or is it still being developed? Yeah, absolutely. So we're in a private beta right now and we actually have people who are using the product coming back every day, loving the experience. We're keeping things very small at the moment. We're gradually scaling them up as we fine tune the core interactions and the core principles involved. How many people are using it in the private beta? So it's pretty small right now. I'd have to check the exact numbers as of today because we just launched two weeks ago, so. Tens, hundreds, thousands? In the smaller range of that. Smaller range, okay. Yeah, so you're controlled beta. We're in a controlled beta, but one of the exciting things is thinking about distribution and think about how easy it is to scale a solution when you have all the core components of this right. So there's VCs here, so obviously Charles is running around, checking everyone out. Insuk Ray is here from Rembrandt. Have you guys talked to some investors at all, and what's the feeling from investors? Yeah, Charles is a great guy. I had a lot of good conversations with him so far. And in general, yeah, we are in execution mode at the moment, and we are really looking to go ahead and prove out a lot of the key concepts that we're working on. And you're based here? Yeah, we're based here in San Francisco. And you're looking for someone that person to be in San Francisco. That's right. Okay, so anyone in San Francisco Bay Area, you want to come join these guys. It's a great app, and I got to say, the whole learning transformation paradigm is completely up in the air right now. It's a great environment to innovate. I'm a huge fan of Khan Academy, a huge fan of Code Academy. We have a Silicon Academy project, which is just now getting up online, not really online, but going, and we're getting some support for it, but it's huge, and it's changing the game. And the learning environment will be, as Mark Hopkins and I talk about, very Xbox-like, where there's going to be a lot of interaction, a lot of real-time data, very gamification-oriented, cool things like that. So I think you guys got a good opportunity. Hope you can find that person. Yeah, I mean, myself as well, and it's really the opportunity to take code, to take node, and make something that's going to work for the two billion people that are learning English over the next 10 years. The numbers are just staggering. Get that product out the door. Ben, thank you very much. Thank you. All right. Pleasure.