As we work with large corporations and organizations, we’ve needed to integrate ScribeStudio into existing portals and Learning Management Systems.

Thanks to the likes of the American Trucking Association’s Highway Watch program, Medline Industries and their Medline University, that’s now under our belt and with it, many now can enjoy seamless access to programs authored and published on ScribeStudio.

As the learning platform for the Department of Homeland Security’s Highway Watch program, tens of thousands of transportation professionals will now be able to pursue highway safety training.

Next time you see a trucker, do the “honk honk pull pull” and tell him that ScribeStudio sent you!

We can now turn on, off or customize various elements within your published Learning Sites, such as navigation bars, labels, access to community features such as Message Boards, ScribeLive Web conferencing, the file Library, and the default Table of Contents.

Like internationalization / language localization, this is something we can work on with you, so be sure to let us know what we can do for you.

CTT is one of the largest IT training organizations in Latin America and they needed their published Learning Sites in Spanish. All of it, that includes automated messages, navigational elements and feedback.

A Canadian company is training sales reps at major retailers to sell the new Sony PS3. They need their published sites in French.

Now they are.

If you need language localization, contact us and we’ll get you on your way.

Feel a little guilty suddenly pulling the plug on your Users and Learners whose time in your Program has run out?

We now send a deactivation notice 2 days before their registration expires, giving them an opportunity to get going and hopefully saving you both the pangs of guilt and the drudgery of support requests.

We’ve added two more options to “Program Settings” that add an extra sheen to an already shiny feature set: emailing your Learners with a “success email” once they’ve completed a Program, and only requiring your Learners to complete those lessons that contain tests – for the smarty pants folks who want to skip over the informational lessons and test out.

Adding Program Completion was a big step for us – thanks to a special project for the State of Oregon we have added the ability for you to set both minimum and maximum times as well as passing score requirements.

That means that it’s now easier than ever to author, publish, and manage training (and similar) Programs for gaining Continuing Education Units where there are specific time and score criteria to meet in order to fulfill the certification requirements.

Go to your Studio’s CourseBuilder and select “Program Settings” to begin the joy.

Two great sucking sounds are going on around me: one, I’m hogging/floading/abusing ScribeStudio bandwidth by uploading masses of audio and video files to the RailsConf 2006 On-Demand Web Site.

It’s gigs going back and forth between our post-production servers and the ScribeStudio servers that deliver the RailsConf site.

Then there are some gigs going back and forth between an audio editor who chops up audio so it fits neat and clean into a multiclip player like this:

And finally there are outgoing gigs for those who’ve already subscribed to the site and gotten hold of the Podcast RSS.

Great sucking sound part two: my head. I alluded to this the other day when I wrote about Flash, Flex and ActionScript 3.0. Basically, I get so knee deep in that which we’re doing that my mind turns off to things that are going on around me.

For example, I met with folk at a museum here in New York yesterday to discuss working together. The Program Director walked me through galleries as he talked about things they’re working on and how if we could feed our ScribeLIVE! Web conferencing into their speaker series, they could have panelists around the world participate in discussions without having to fly them in and put them up in hotels.

Of course we can do that. That’s all very easy. But as I stared at paintings by John Lurie I thought to myself, well, wow, there’s a world of stuff going on out here.

I forget about that sometimes, and of all the things that I don’t want to forget, the fact that there’s a world of things going on tops the list.

It’s a mind game. Rest generally recharges the batteries but there’s so little time to take typical rest. But rest comes in different forms and one of the RailsConf speakers (Nathaniel Talbott, maybe? Hard to remember anymore as it’s all become a blur) nailed the concept of rest well on the head.

Rest isn’t sloth. It isn’t necessarily sitting on a couch with the remote in one hand and a pint of Chunky Monkey in the other.

Instead, rest is a moving of the mind and body. Of focussing the mind and body on something different than the everyday. It can be riding a bike. It can be reading a book. It can be seeing a movie. It can be going to a museum.

For me it’s increasingly playing music. I used to do this a lot, with fairly regular gigs at the Knitting Factory. I stopped all that a few years ago but now I’m back into it and even brought my guitar to the Studio today so I can noodle tonight when everyone goes home.

Actually, I’m playing with a crazy Frenchman and we’re working on music to put glide in people’s stride. Haven’t played guitar in ages although it’s one of the things I used to do very well. I switched to electronic noodling a while back. Choice of tools is Propellerheads’ Reason and Digidesign’s Pro-Tools. If you happen to subscribe to the RailsConf 2006 Keynote Series Podcast you’ll hear me and my notemaking at the beginningo each episode.

Anyway, it’s Thursday. I’m a bit pooped so I’ll play some music. If it’s still hot and steamy this weekend, I’ll go to the beach and swim as far as my haggard body will take me. And hopefully, by next week, the great sucking sounds around me will have dissipated.

we’re working on an e-learning project right now for the department of homeland security highway watch program. we’re working with the american trucking association to create online courses using the ScribeStudio toolkit. the courses will be taken by truckers and other people who spend a lot of time on the highways.

the goal is vigilance – keeping our highways safe. it’s quite the group effort. ScribeStudio is the e-Learning authoring, learning management system, and live webcasting piece of the puzzle.

our friend’s at full advantage are the ones who are developing the courses using the ScribeStudio course authoring tools. their instructional designers are meeting each week with the ATA to repurpose existing offline course content to an online environment.

through single-sign-on, people who log into the ATA web site can then take courses, depending on who they are. when a trucker logs in, he can see which courses are available to him, and when he clicks on the course he is passed through to our environment. anexinet is managing the project and coordinating with our friends at the american trucking association down in virginia. they’re like air traffic control.

the estimate is that about 100,000 people will go through the program each year. more people will come on-board as they add new programs.

what makes the project interesting is thinking about ways in which truckers, not known for their heavy internet use, can access content. examples include making audio / video content available on cell phones, iPods, and other devices that they might have more frequent access to.

here is my trucker look:



big buddy to little buddy…do you copy?

i figure since lots of people ask the same types of questions, why not answer some of them here…

With $29.00.per mo can you cancel at any time or is the subscription for one year?

and my response…

Hi,

You can cancel at anytime. ScribeStudio is like a utility. The more you use it, the more you pay, the less you use it the less you pay, if you no longer want to use it, you don’t pay :-)

Monthly payments are based on the number of learners you have each month (storage and bandwidth also affect price but not for your average user).

If you have 10 in the first month you pay $49. if you have 100 in the second month, you pay $247, no matter how often they log in. Most people start with a $29 subscription while they author their course. Then, when they are ready to open for business, they move to the next subscription plan.

I hope this helps.

Peter

in the same way that people constantly butcher the term “podcast”, the word webcast is being butchered as well.

to put an mp3 file on your website so that people can download it to their desktop or listen to it as a stream is not to podcast enable your site. to give people the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed so that any time you add a new mp3 file they are notified by their podcast manager of choice, e.g. iTunes, is a podcast. a podcast is the process of someone actively subscribing to your recorded audio feed.

in the same way, to announce to the world your next upcoming webcast, which requires your participants to 1. dial an 800 number and 2. log into a website to access your slides, is a misrepresentation. that is a phonecast, or a conference call, and they’ve been around since the middle of the 20th century.

a true webcast is all that the name implies. namely, that you require your participants to perform a single action – log into this web site to listen to the audio of the live presentation, watch the live video (if applicable), and go through the speaker slides in real time, along with the speaker.

our goal at ScribeStudio is to give our customers all the tools to organize and produce a successful webcast. if the whole world is moving online, and voice over IP is all the rage, why make people dial an 800 number in addition to visiting a website? make it simple. make it convenient. make it entirely web-based.

the reason i am sort of ranting is because crappy webcasts give all of us a bad reputation that we have to fight. i’ve heard “boring” mentioned many times when i ask people if they’ve attended a webcast and probed them on their experience. we’ve set the bar of expectations low as an industry.

ScribeLive, our web conferencing tool, is one of the many tools in your ScribeStudio toolkit. the special sauce we add on top of the tool, which anyone can use with point and click simplicity to create their own live webcasts, is our own production capabilities. in a world of no lawyers and no liability, i wanted our tagline to be “f*&K webex”, cause webex webcasts stink.

we just moved into a new space here in new york that has a large webcast studio for the specific purpose of helping our customers increase the production value of their live webcasts.

there is no reason webcast production cannot elevate itself to a level that we as consumers of moving image content are used to, and that level is defined by TV production.

our goal, and what we are helping customers across many industry verticals with, is to marry high production value with quality content to produce amazing webcasts.

that’s our whole business proposition to the world with ScribeLive, our live webcast tool: marry high production (read tv quality) with great content to create an A+ webcast experience.

you want to make the person who participates say to themselves “wow, that was actually really good” in an unexpected way. i.e. the bar by everyone else has been set so low in terms of what a webcast is all about (dial this phone number, log into this web site to look at slides). how about a 2 camera shoot webcast with high-end digital video cameras?

the next version of our web conferencing tool, ScribeLive, will also be able to scale up to the 10s of thousands of simultaneous live participants…live, participatory TV on the web with anchorman bob moderating a panel discussion on a timely, relevant topic for industry professionals.

in short, we marry a great technology / tool (ScribeLive) with great content (an animated speaker, interesting guests, a timely, relevant topic), and great production value (cut from camera one, which shows the guest telling a funny story, to camera two, which shows the moderator laughing). we do this in the cozy confines of our studio, or we can take the show on the road with our mobile studio / production capabilities.

we train our customers to be interesting on air personalities and we are honest with them if they are not and recommend they find someone who can keep the audience interested. remember, this is show business!!

we help choose topics that might be buzz-worthy and interesting to their target audience, we recommend they identify guests who are engaging, not drones. someone who is an expert and a great writer may not translate to on camera. and if the goal is to excite your audience enough so that they can’t wait to participate in your next webcast, you have to make these types of choices and recognize your own strengths and weaknesses. maybe bob the CEO is not the right on-air personality. maybe jane the marketing person is a better on air talent.

also known as ScribePresenter. I wrote about it in an earlier post, but recently had a customer ask:

We want to get this PowerPoint presentation up on our site as we did the others. I am currently going through a cd of audio for this and breaking it down into segments that will coincide with the slides. I am hoping to get that out to you in MP3 form by Monday afternoon. My question is Can this be up on the site for Tues afternoon?

the answer is absolutely yes! customers do not need our help for this though. ScribePresenter, one of the many tools in your ScribeStudio toolkit, lets you upload your PowerPoint slides, and an mp3 file that relates to each slide, to create an engaging web-based PowerPoint presentation.

gone are the days of sending someone an email with a 1MB PowerPoint attachment, having a small percentage of people actually downloading the PowerPoint to their desktop and an even smaller percentage of people opening it to review.

the problem when they review it is that there is no one to guide them through your bullet points and pretty graphics. If you could narrate the entire presentation, helping them focus on the important points you want them to remember from each page, it would be like you are presenting to them in person, standing in front of the room.

the problem is that if you were to also embed audio in your 1MB PowerPoint it would suddenly become a 5MB file, a virtual Outlook heart attack waiting to as this big fat file tries to get to someone’s inbox.

if you could send a tiny email with a blue link to a web-based presentation, more people would click on the link than download a file to desktop and open. people would be able to listen to you talk while going through the slides.

if you want to do a real time presentation, no problem, use ScribeLive web conferencing, which lets your attendees watch and listen to you in real time and look at your slides as you scroll through them. but if you want to create straight to archive events that you can use as marketing collateral or e-learning material, ScribePresenter is the tool for you.