NANOLEARNING™ LAUNCHES AT DEMOFALL
A Marketplace for User Generated Learning Content
AUSTIN, TEXAS and SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – September 25, 2006 NanoLearning™, the peer-produced learning marketplace, launched today at DEMOfall ‘06, a premier showcase for launching new, cutting edge technology products. The event takes place in San Diego from September 25-27, 2006 and features the most innovative new companies in the world.
Everybody has unique expertise to share, but not all subject matter experts are computer experts. With basic computing skills anyone can create NanoLearning™ for the marketplace that contains not just text and images, but interactive activities and assessments. Without any programming, people can create rich, interactive learning in minutes and publish it in the marketplace where anybody can find it, review it, and provide feedback on it. NanoLearning™ is always online and immediate, so authors can incorporate feedback from learners to improve the quality of their learning constantly. Enterprises are finding NanoLearning™ a great way to provide performance support by hyperlinking learning to operational systems and business process flowcharts. Key features of NanoLearning™ include:
- The ability to create learning content that is accessed via a standard URL, without any programming
- NanoLists to aggregate and publish learning collections
- RSS feeds to notify authors and users upon updates or new comments
- Change the skin (look, feel, and screen size) with one click
- Go mobile instantly with no changes
Chris Shipley, executive producer of DEMOfall ‘06 handpicked NanoLearning from a highly competitive field of companies. “Until today a public marketplace for learning didn’t exist, yet learning is something we all do every day,” she stated. “NanoLearning is empowering everyday people to create, share, and aggregate interactive learning experiences.” Organizations are embracing rapid learning tools that empower users and efficiently deliver small chunks of learning, according to Josh Bersin, president of Bersin & Associates, a leading research firm specializing in enterprise learning and talent management. “Our recent studies show that over 50% of the training issues in enterprises are time-critical, and many are dependent on information from subject matter experts,” he said. “Speed is essential in today’s competitive business environment, fueling a 60% growth in the market for tools such NanoLearning.”
About DEMOfall
Produced by Network World Events and Executive Forums, the semi-annual DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products, which are hand-selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying tomorrow’s cutting-edge technologies, and have served as launch pad events for companies such as Palm, E*Trade, Handspring, and U.S. Robotics, helping them to secure venture funding, establish critical business relationships, and influence early adopters. Each DEMO conference features approximately 70 new companies, products and technologies. For more information, visit www.demo.com.
About NanoLearning™
NanoLearning™ is the marketplace for user-created learning. With NanoLearning™ anybody who can access the web can create, share, and aggregate interactive learning content. Bersin & Associates estimates the market for rapid learning tools to be approximately $500 million, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 60%. The company is privately held and is headquartered in Austin, Texas. To learn more about NanoLearning™, visit www.nanolearning.com.
Alan said
Sounds like you’re on the right track – well done for getting onto DemoFall, although I couldn’t view the demo video for some reason
I actually designed and built something similar (but for intra-enterprise use, not for public access … that’s a cool idea!) a couple of years ago using Flash MX and Perl/CGI, and a phase 1 version was deployed within a fortune 50 enterprise for a particular project. When I demo-ed and presented the idea to the Learning project managers, they could immediately see the benefits: short to-the-point workflow learning that they could create, edit and deploy themselves online, the use of pre-designed templates suited to whatever corporate brand the learning required, no use of the complex LMS system, full XML API, automated import/export of PPT presentations, etc. They wanted a follow-up, but it seemed that the tool was a little ‘before its time’ – they eventually decided they wanted to stick with their LMS tools and PPT presentations and ‘viewlets’ (easy to create but horrible to edit…!). But the design (and other similar ones) never left me.
Anyway, I’m glad to see someone going the same route… and love the idea of offering this almost ‘wikipedia’ style to the public. However I would strongly recommend that if you want to ‘corner’ the enterprise market, you also offer at least a secure ‘portal’ for enterprise customers, or possibly better would be a separate installable product that they can manage themselves (with your support!).
Good luck with your venture – I look forward to seeing how you get on with mobile-based flash (thankfully no longer restricted to Flash 4…
Alan
nanolearning said
Thanks for the comments Alan. We’re definitely not the first to think of this concept. I’ve spoken with several people who have built similar things. I appreciate your suggestions, and could probably learn a lot from your experiences working in this area.
We are thinking about the possibility of a network appliance for corporations.