NanoLearning

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

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.

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,

I just returned from a speaking engagement at Workforce Performance, an event for professionals who are interested in the field of performance support and measurement in their organizations. The event was mostly attended by training professionals who are trying to figure out how to align training programs with organizational performance. Some interesting observations:

Performance Support - When talking about job aids or guidance while you are performing a task, people don’t have time to enroll in a course on their Learning Management System (LMS). They need it now, and it needs to be short and to the point. Just get me past the task that I’m trying to accomplish.

Mobility - I attended a session where the speaker had research that said up to 50% of the average office worker’s tasks are performed away from the desk. Very fascinating. And with the rise of some great new devices like the Blackberry Pearl and the Treo 750 perhaps mobile learning will become more commonplace.

All of these things validate the NanoLearning approach in terms of microchunking and mobility. Yes you read that right, I typed mobility. Not a pre-announcement or anything, but lets just say that we’ve got something in the works.

Bryan Menell

Every year the Gartner Group publishes it’s hype cycle chart for new technologies. I found the hype cycle for 2005 published here at the Gartner website so you can see what the cycle looks like. For the 2006 chart you must buy the research. I found it interesting to note the elements of NanoLearning that fit nicely on the hype cycle chart for 2006. They are:

• Collective Intelligence — This is a brand new entry. It refers to a decentralized group of people creating content. They specify “intellectual” content, and I think that would include learning content. You’d think they read our business plan! We allow the “wisdom of the crowds” to create learning media.
• Web 2.0 — The shift to user-generated and controlled content is at the heart of Web 2.0 (e.g. Flickr, Blogger, MySpace). At NanoLearning we’re shifting learning content generation from centralized structures to individuals, and groups of individuals.
• RSS Enterprise — The routine use of RSS in the enterprise. We support RSS feeds to notify users when NanoLearning has been changed or updated. So when your favorite NanoLearning on kanban’s in a JIT system gets updated, you will get a notification in your favorite RSS reader.

We’ll stop there, but we’re awefully proud that we’re on the same page as leading industry analysts.

This is the place where you will find all sorts of information from us about the development and progress of NanoLearning. Since it is a blog, we hope that you comment liberally. I can’t stress enough how important your ideas and suggestions are. We are not a huge faceless corporation; we read every email that comes through.

Right now NanoLearning is in a private beta test. Many features of the system are operational, and it’s possible to create some really great learning media with it. But we have lots more features in development. Of course all this is worth nothing if we don’t have a great community of people creating great learning content with it. That’s where you come in too.

Welcome to the blog!