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While in Amsterdam for the Maemo Summit 2009, I met up with Marina Tognetti, founder and CEO of Myngle.com

Myngle.com is a global language platform, where teachers and students from all over the world can teach and learn new languages. Myngle launched in December 2007. As of autumn 2009, it covers 51 languages with over 300 teachers and has 36000+ users from 162 countries.

Marina, an Italian who loves learning new languages, studied business and economics in Italy and then got strong corporate experience with stints at Proctor and Gamble, Philips and Sara-Lee. She left her role in eBay to create ‘an eBay for languages.’ She believes that everybody should have a chance to learn any language, no matter where they are located.

And Myngle does just this. Any student can learn any language online with live classes and real teachers. All teachers are carefully selected and trained by Myngle.

So how does Myngle work? Well, the student is king. You choose your teacher, your lesson time and price. You can try before you buy with a free trial. After that, you buy a learning package. You can opt for individual lessons or group.

Myngle was born while Marina was working for ebay – she’d been trying to learn Chinese. She’d been to school for 3 months for 2 hours a week, in a class of 25 learners. It just didn’t work. But private lessons didn’t work either – Marina had to select teachers by trial and error – unlike ebay, where you know what you’re getting, and the feedback is recorded.

Marina believes you really need a person to interact – to learn and correct. You don’t learn in a normal exchange. She believes your teacher will push you in one-to-one interaction. However, Myngle teachers adapt to your needs – if you like to learn by focussing on grammar rules, they’ll work with you on that.

Myngle is very selective when choosing teachers. Anyone can apply, however, teachers are personally screened – and Myngle guarantees that every one of their 300 teachers is good. All Myngle teachers have great experience in offline and online teaching.

Marina explained to me that Myngle students tend to be older and more serious than your average social learning network student. They’re often learning for business purposes. They’re spending money and want results – language learning is a serious investment for them.

Myngle’s try before you buy approach is really working for the website – according to Marina, a huge majority of those who try, buy. They love the service. But then Marina’s philosophy on customer service is to ‘always overdeliver’.

Myngle was started up with Marina’s personal finance. It has since secured two rounds of funding, and is in the process of securing a third. Marina and her team spent 2008 getting the site features just right and ensuring quality would be high. They spent 2009 focussing on marketing and customer service. 2010 will be all about the customer – reaching out to as many more language learners as Myngle can.

Interestingly, Marina observed that ‘Education is the only non-consumer centred industry in the world’. She believes this is wrong – and indeed can explain many of the educational failures we experience. She believes that the education sector is changing. The customer is taking control. They can now choose the teacher, method of learner, the time and place.

This approach leads the learner to eventually only needing an independent assessment as a means of certifying the learners knowledge – Donald Clarke has an interesting post on that here.

I’ll be testing Myngle out while I’m in Paris – I’ll review how I found their system.

You can follow Myngle on twitter @myngler