Jonathan Palley

      a company I co-founded and served as COO/CTO. The company was successfully acquired by Eleutian Technology about four years after its founding. We scaled one-on-one training. Using work-at-home folks in the U.S. and custom brew of technology and content, we taught students to speak English faster, more consistantly and at 1/3 the cost of anyone in the market.

I managed a multi-national, multi-disciplinary team of 40 professionals in Beijing and over 100 part time instructors in the U.S. We raised two rounds of professional funding.
Our service worked so well that we are the first company in the world who offer a money-back gaurantee that we can raise our learner's speaking score in standardized tests.
Along the way, we've stumbled on some exciting things:

• Based on over 50,000 recordings of students answering hundreds of thousands of IELTS question we released a breakthrough book. The book was distributed throughout China by the country's largest foreign language press, FLTRP and is based on the content in our online courses. Buy it here.
• The British Council, the pre-eminent English Language Teaching authority completed a PM Gordon Brown mandated online teaching pilot using our technology and methodology.
• We have a lot of people using our service. We have success stories every single day. I just can't say exactly how many here.

We were VC backed with some really great advisors and investors like the original guys who built Skype, the founder of the largest distributed call-center company and more. Most importantly, I was blessed to have a great team that made all of it possible.
Read more about EQEnglish/Idapted in China's national English paper, GlobalTimes

      I perform and facilitate workshops with Beijing Improv, a group I and a few friends began. Improv is a structured (and comedic) way to be spontaneous and creative and it has really hit a nerve in Beijing. We are the first people to do improv in China.
Here are some "fun" facts:

We have SOLD out (250+ people) our monthly shows for the past three years.

In the last two years over 2000 people have taken part in Beijing Improv shows and workshops. Approx 92% heard about us from word-of-mouth and the community is the most mixed, culturally and economically, of any you will find in Beijing!

TimeOut Beijing said: "The best bang for your English theater Yuan in the city...Beijing Improv really knows how to work a crowd...even better, how to whip them into hysterical laughter".

Beijing Improv is all-volunteer, does no real marketing and proceeds of our events have raised >30k RMB for local NGOs.
For me, it has been the ultimate laboratory for understanding cross-culture creativity, teamwork and comedy in a deep and hands-on way. A really amazing thing.

      a piece of software I wrote and sold. Nearly 500,000 people downloaded it. It was the first flashcard-on-the-computer program to integrate sharing of flashcard sets on the internet. I wrote the first version in high school with a friend.
       We had users in nearly every continent. I was also one of the first advertisers on google adwords and used SEM/Landing Page optimizations long before it was standard practice. Most importantly, through talking with all my users I saw the power of educational technology in a global society - I was hooked.

      Acted in and/or produced 20 plays (including 10 Shakespeare productions) and was the Executive Producer of the Stanford Shakespeare Players, a nationally recognized repertoire Shakespeare ensemble. If you can manage actors, you can manage anything.

      I also worked in Biophotonics Research for many summers, using optical signatures for endoscopic cancer detection. It was fascinating and fun - but took too long for me to see my work benefit end users.

      Why? Because physics is the foundation of engineering and science. And theater attempts, in a hands-on-way, to get at the foundation of human interaction, communication and creativity. I can always teach myself practical skills, so I figured while at University it makes sense to learn the fundamentals.

      on innovation, technology and learning. My favorite talk is below. It was given at the SD2C Conference - China's largest programmer conference. Take a look. What do you think?

Here is a picture of me speaking at the British Council English Research Symposium



And, just for good measure, here is a picture of me on stage at a Beijing Improv show (playing an audience participation game)

      I am "not a nerd". No, really. You can read it here. Note that there are many other factual errors in that article as well!

      I don't use Twitter and avoid using Facebook for anything beyond a directory; I see the value of these technologies, but prefer the spontaneity direct conversation allows. Contact me at email jpalley [at] gmail [dot] com or on skype at jpalley.