CellCast Solution Wins Gold Brandon Hall Award!

We were pleased to learn yesterday that OnPoint's CellCast Solution won the Gold Award from Brandon Hall for 2009 in the "Best Advance in Technology for Mobile Learning Authoring" category. Congratulations to our entire team for all their continuing efforts and outstanding achievements and kudos to all of the other winners across every competed category; we all work/exist in an industry where innovation is alive and well! 

Click HERE to see the entire list of 2009 Excellence in Learning Technology winners and their awarded prizes.

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Dissecting Saba's New "Anywhere" Product for Mobile Learning

I happened upon a tweet last week while trolling my Twitter in-box that heralded a product announcement from Saba for their new "Saba Anywhere" offering which they described as follows: "Saba Anywhere is a mobile platform that lets people take their learning on the go." The press release continues with details on how flexible, capable and secure the new offering is so I read on with great interest. Instinctively, I reasoned another one of the "Big 10" LMS/Talent Management platform players was finally joining the mLearning party introducing their own well conceived and highly polished solution for the creation, packaging, delivery and tracking on mobile-friendly content to on-the-go workers via their omnipresent smartphone devices. If you're thinking this announcement/product branding meant the same thing, a little further investigation would prove you wrong too!  The marketing post outlines the following:

At first blush, this all sounds great!  But peeling back the onion a bit reveals the plain fact the supported mobile device all this "mobile-accessible" content is delivered to and consumed on is a standard Windows-based laptop or desktop computer. Thump!

Okay, that's interesting news on a few levels but the likelihood today's typical enterprise mobile employee/executive traveling around for business doesn't have an enterprise smartphone in their pocket/purse in addition to their enterprise laptop computer taking up space and adding heft in their briefcase is increasingly slim-to-none. Furthermore, a recent Mobile Workforce Report conducted by iPass on "Employee Device Preference" revealed that 63% of respondents preferred to whip out their smartphone for work-related tasks versus cranking up their laptop computer to conduct those same biz chores. If booting my laptop takes me 2+ minutes and acquiring a suitable wireless signal takes another 1-2 minutes in some appropriate hot spot, by the time I'm finally ready to get down to learning something I may have already missed the window of opportunity. Contrast that experience/hardship to using your at-the-ready smartphone that enables true "Anywhere" and anytime learning and we begin to question the potential of this strategy.  Not to mention that smartphone-based learning can happen whether I'm seated patiently in a lobby waiting to see a customer/prospect, or standing in a queue ordering lunch or smashed into a commuter train heading home after a long day -- try opening your laptop and taking your course in those environments!  


Agreed, the desktop/laptop course experience is richer (more Flashy) today versus the mobile experience and considered by many to be easier to view and consume compared to some mobile content, but true engagement and learning are not only possible but highly achievable on the current crop of next generation mobile devices like the BlackBerry, Apple iPhone/iPod touch and iPad, Google Android and Windows Mobile smartphones that now proliferate across the enterprise. Yesterday's desktop/laptop-optimized content may need to be rethought and re-factored as well but the set of available tools and methods to accomplish these tasks improves daily...the rate of change is accelerating like nothing I've witnessed before and the mobile device (READ: smartphone) will soon be the dominate platform for content delivery (and training delivery) globally.  

Much of what the Saba team gleaned in designing and bringing their new Anywhere offer to market can likely serve as foundational knowledge for the next anticipated step in their evolution towards true mobile learning. They can even re-purpose their adopted product tag line too when that time comes ("...Complete your training anywhere, anytime, regardless of network connectivity.").

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CellCast Widget for iPad - The Video!

I took the opportunity to do a live screen capture of our new CellCast Widget for Apple iPad today to better illustrate the key features and functionality we've included in our first release supporting Apple's revolutionary new tablet device. This presentation, captured using Camtasia for Mac and converted to an MP4/Flash format for easier web viewing, demonstrates a series of the core features that allow our customers and partners to plan, create, deploy and track a variety of learning content and performance support materials to their mobile workforce using the widest array of mobile devices possible.

In the video, we demonstrate how a combination of iPad-compatible M4V videos, MP3 podcasts, animated PowerPoint presentations and other mobile friendly web content are pushed down to a secure learning framework and enriched with tracked assessments, targeted messaging/notifications and mobile-accessible social networking platforms.  All user interactions including who/what/when/where/how long are fully tracked and managed in a centralized database which can also be fully integrated with an organization's Learning Management System or Sales Force Automation system as needed.

If you've already got an iPad and you're interested in evaluating the new Widget yourself, please drop me a line at rgadd @ onpointlearning.com and we'll set you up with a demo account to play with all the new features and functionality.

CLICK HERE to launch the demonstration video.

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CellCast Widget for iPad Released!

It's officially iPad Launch Day and we're pleased to announce our CellCast Widget for iPad was included in the inaugural 1,000 applications shipped in support of Apple's revolutionary new tablet computing device. Better yet, we're the only sanctioned iPad application listed whenever a iTunes user searches on "mobile learning" or "m-learning" in the iTune App Store -- a situation that's certainly going to change in the coming days though as others jump on board the new device train.

I just spent the week over in Texas previewing our new iPad application (along with the rest of our CellCast Solution platform) to several different partners, customers and prospects who all anticipate the positive market reaction the iPad will have on the mlearning market.  Everyone concurs these iPad devices should slot into the mobile learning device market quite nicely and, as one of the mobile device market analysts stated earlier this week, should only cannibalize market share from Apple's existing iPod touch media player while replacing those sales with higher price/higher margin iPad sales!

If you're lucky enough to already have your new iPad, we invite you to go to the App Store and download a free copy of our Widget and try it out.  Send me an email to rgadd @onpointlearning.com and I'll even setup a private account for you and assign several more content examples for you to play around with too.

In my next post, I'll provide a guided video walk through of our iPad application and the many features we're excited about. 

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