Archive for October, 2006

Happy Halloween!

October 31, 2006 at 3:35 pm · Filed under General, News, nano-learning

I’d like to wish you a Happy Halloween! To help you have fun and stay safe, one of our users created some NanoLearning on safe Trick-or-Treating with your family. Click here to view it.

We have the capability to embed NanoLearning inline with a blog entry, and I would have done it here. However, WordPress does not allow their users to embed Flash into blog entries. That happens to be one of my personal “pet peeves” about WordPress, and most likely one of the reasons for us switching blogging platforms pretty soon. On the page with the NanoLearning title and description, you will see a link titled “Blog this” where you can create a blog entry that links to a piece of NanoLearning, or embed’s the NanoLearning directly into the blog entry.

You may have also noticed some changes on the Explore tab. Instead of giving you a big list of NanoLearning things we’re showing you the Top 10 most popular NanoLearning objects. Any NanoLearning can still always be accessed via it’s URL, or you can type part of it’s name in the “Search” box just like Google.

From the Explore menu, there is a submenu named Advanced Search. You can use that to search even the content of a piece of NanoLearning. So if you can’t remember the title or description, but you know it mentioned the planets, then search the content for “planet” and you will find it.

I know it sounds simple to be able to search in the content of a piece of any learning, but actually it isn’t. Most learning is built in Flash, and seach engines like Google can’t dig into the textual content of a Flash movie. Luckily we have designed our system in a way that lets you search learning content, and lets Google index NanoLearning content.

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Skillsoft – The Flipside

October 26, 2006 at 10:11 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Yesterday Skillsoft (NASDAQ: SKIL) announced a deal to acquire the NETg division of Thomson for $285M. I call it the “flipside” because NETg makes their money selling off-the-shelf e-learning courseware which is at the opposite end of the spectrum from NanoLearning, which is the more democratic version where anybody can create e-learning courseware. Just for fun, lets look at the financials of this deal.

To start with Skillsoft has been moving sideways for a while with no revenue growth, but they’re putting maybe 6% to the bottom line. Not bad, but it’s hard to prop up a P/E of 30 when you’re not growing. The market recognizes this and rewards this non-performance with a pretty unremarkable stock price.

Skillsoft Stock Chart

Skillsoft revenues are around $220M and they’re going to pay $285M for NETg. That’s gutsy! They’ve got $70M in cash, and they’re going to borrow $180M to buy this company. Plus NETg revenues have been declining solidly over the past several years from a peak of over $400M down to $160M today. If nothing else, the folks at Thomson are shrewd businessmen and are probably happy to shed this business unit at what looks like a premium. Based upon the hit that Skillsoft stock took today, I’d say the market is not too happy with them paying a premium like this for a shrinking business unit.

Obviously it’s a big risk for Skillsoft; perhaps the biggest in their company’s history. We will see if it pays off.

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Ambient Insight Report

October 25, 2006 at 8:22 pm · Filed under General, nano-learning, peer production

NanoLearning was recently mentioned in an industry report from Ambient Insight on the state of the e-learning industry. You can find details about the report here including a free executive summary. You can purchase the report directly from the website. To quote from the overview:

It is a new industry and the old rules do not apply. The market now favors innovative “disruptor” suppliers that are skilled at meeting the needs of the new buyers.

The report talks about how the relatively high cost to create rich self-paced e-learning content is an inhibitor to growth in the market. Most analyst estimates place the cost of developing engaging interactive e-learning courses at $25,000 – $50,000 per learning hour. We believe that revolution happens not when costs decrease 25% or even 50%, but by 2-3 orders of magnitude. The personal computer revolution was fueled by dropping the costs of owning a computer from $250,000 to $2,500. The cost to produce video has gone from $1,000 per minute to $500 for unlimited minutes, and that is driving the personal video craze at websites like YouTube and Revver.

Even if only 10 people in the world care to watch a video of me lipsynching to Shakira, if the production costs are almost zero the price is right. If nothing else, Web 2.0 is about ultra specialization.

NanoLearning is doing the same thing with interactive self-paced learning by providing free tools and infrastructure, and a business model that charges for premium services (becoming known as the “freemium” business model).  When you add to that the trend toward user-generated content, along with feedback/ratings and social aspects of learning you get powerful results.

We don’t release statistics, but I will tell you that over half of our users are from outside the United States. They tell us that the e-learning revolution never really happened in their countries because most businesses could not afford to buy six-figure LMS software or spend large amounts on content creation. That is true of small and medium sized businesses in the United States as well.

If people are starting to label NanoLearning as a market disruptor, then we are starting to make some progress.

Technorati tags: NanoLearning, nano-learning, microlearning, freemium, disruptors

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Good News for Mac Users

October 13, 2006 at 8:07 pm · Filed under News

We tracked down and fixed some issues that Mac users were having with NanoLearning this week. Our top notch technical team found some functions that Mac browsers don’t support, so we crafted a workaround for that. You will also notice some popup tooltips on certain icons, letting users know what they do. Just a couple little usability enhancements for you.

We’re working on a user forum so that people can create and share ideas, suggestions, and issues, and we can reply and interact with you in a forum. That way future generations can search all the forum discussions and find all our your great advice and ideas.

We’ve had some bloggers cover NanoLearning in the past few weeks. People are talking about us on microlearning.org, HotFromSiliconValley.com, TechCrunch (what’s hot at DEMO), and StartupSquad. Join the conversation!

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New Features and Fixes

October 6, 2006 at 8:35 pm · Filed under News

Coming back from DEMO we had some great feedback and ideas. Plus now that we have opened the door to everyone, we have thousands of users from all over the world! The launch is not the end for NanoLearning, but quite the opposite. We’re just getting started!

Here are some of the things we have been hard at work on, and are rolling out in the next few days:

  •  Some usability enhancements, including better instructions on your homepage, and hover tooltips.
  • We had an issue with some accent characters, noted by some of our users in Brazil. That has been fixed.
  • Google indexing of your NanoLearning content. We’re integrating with Google to allow them to scan the actual contents of your NanoLearning, and not just the name and description. With lots of other people linking to great NanoLearning, it will rise in page rank. We’re still waiting for the day when Google returns NanoLearning on the first page of hits on a particular topic.

We are still working on some issues that Macintosh users are having.  Mac users are a large and creative community, and we want to make sure our applications works flawlessly on the latest version of Firefox for the Mac.

Technorati tags:  NanoLearning

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From the DEMO floor

October 6, 2006 at 8:04 pm · Filed under General



Originally uploaded by Bryan Menell.

Here is a great picture of Paulo and I at the NanoLearning booth at DEMOfall ‘06. This is actually the first day of DEMO, and we are not scheduled to go on stage till the last day. We met a bunch of great people from the press, and a lot of venture firms that specialize in early-stage companies stopped by our booth for a look at NanoLearning.

Not the scared look on our faces!

Technorati tags: demofall06, demofall2006, NanoLearning

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DEMOfall ‘06

October 2, 2006 at 4:20 pm · Filed under General

You can see our 6-minute demonstration of NanoLearning on the DEMO website by clicking here.

NanoLearning was chosen from hundreds of companies to launch and demonstrate the product at DEMOfall. In prior years, great products and companies such as E*Trade, Palm, and Java have been launched at DEMO events. It was a pleasure to be able to demonstrate our product to Chris Shipley, and then to the entire DEMO audience.

Chris Shipley and Bryan Menell

The attendance at DEMO is mainly members of the press and investors who are interested in early stage companies. The technology writers from publications like the New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal were all in attendance. It’s a great opportunity for them to see a whole bunch of new technology companies in rapid fire succession. Likewise for venture capital firms, it would take them months to schedule meetings with 60 companies and see their products. We had great conversations with folks from First Round Capital, Austin Ventures, the Omidyar Network, Northbridge Venture Capital, and Granite Ventures to name a few.

Technorati tags: demofall06, demofall2006, NanoLearning,

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