Canson to Launch PaperShow for Mac at MacWorld 2010

For the past year I have been using PaperShow extensively when I teach, do presentations, and for webinars. It has been a really indispensable tool and I carry PaperShow in my bag wherever I go. Because of PaperShow's ease of use and portability I can walk into any room and within seconds have a digital flipchart ready to go, to share and capture ideas. I have written about my experiences with PaperShow on this blog for the past year and from day one have asked Canson "when will we see PaperShow for the Mac?" Well that day is finally coming and I am happy to share with you that Canson will launch PaperShow for Mac this week at the MacWorld 2010 Conference to be held in San Francisco.

I have worked closely with Canson during this past year and I will be going to MacWorld 2010 to help them launch their new product. I have been working with PaperShow for Mac for the past couple of weeks and in some ways it is even easier to use than the Windows version. With all of the functionality of the Windows version and the ease of use of the Mac this is a real winner. So if you plan on attending MacWorld 2010, stop by the PaperShow Booth in the Exhibitor Hall-Booth 746 and say hello. I will also be doing a presentation on Friday February 12th, a Product Spotlight Session: Make Your Presentations Come to Life with PAPERSHOW for the Mac from 1:30 PM - 2:00 PM. So stop by the booth or come and learn more about PaperShow for the Mac at my presentation.

An Interview with Audrey Dalton from CodeBaby Part 2

Part 2 of Interview with Audrey Dalton

BSF: Can you share some examples for us as to how eLearning Designers are taking advantage of CodeBaby for their services or products?

Services:

We offer a very generous support policy for 18% of your final single license price.
Includes:
✓ 1 year of free updates including major version changes
✓ Priority phone and email support + 12 hours of application assistance on customer projects

Lots of designers take advantage of custom services through clothing changes, character changes, and even completely new characters. We have clients that ask for doctors, nurses, specific uniforms, hats, etc.

Additionally, in the very near future, we're gearing up to provide a more extensive lineup of training services, from self-service tutorials to webinars to onsite training. We currently provide this training, but we're looking forward to extending the offerings.

And at this point, since we're a very personalized organization that's still growing, we offer a very human connection when you're dealing with us. We provide unique solutions for each client.

Telstra, the largest internet provider, trains 40,000 employees on the best practices of social media engagement featuring character "Lily". They do this by integrating Lily into an interactive flash comic book.

The Medical School at McMaster University raised public awareness of asthma symptoms on behalf of the Asthma Society of Canada, in honor of World Asthma Day. They publicly launched the module “Taking Control of Your Asthma” on May 9, 2009.


ASTD Best Winner, global accounting firm, Grant Thornton, uses CodeBaby characters in multiple languages across the globe this is due to the language independent lip synching. Learners achieved an average of a 11% higher score than the national average for their most recent tax training.

The University of Illinois uses a specific mad scientist custom characters in its science eLearning modules.

I could go on, but the list is extensive.

BSF: What eLearning applications can you integrate CodeBaby into?

AD: Anything that accepts a swf, avi or flv file, for example Articulate, Captivate, PowerPoint, Lectora, Rapid Intake, and Learn.com, etc. I'm not recommending specific tools, but the point is that this works with most everything. The only restriction we have is that you are using the CodeBaby characters for internal learning uses and you're not trying to sell eLearning that includes the CodeBaby character, unless you have a specific agreement with us.


BSF: What is the learning curve for integrating CodeBaby into your current projects?

AD: Extremely fast. If you're an eLearning developer, with one or two tutorials and perhaps a webinar, you'll be able to create a two character interaction almost immediately. I'm fairly tech savvy but nowhere near the skill level of some of our eLearning partners, and I can now create custom animated one character interaction, and I learned that in one day. We have one client, Wendy Phillips with Big Pond in Australia, that learned the program and developed an award-winning flash comic book eLearning program on employee orientation all in a matter of two weeks - from start to finish.

BSF: Could you walk us briefly through the steps to develop an eLearning solution using the CodeBay Production Studio?

AD: Yes, first things first. After you decide to use characters to simulate role plays or specific people, define that character's persona. Run a contest to name and describe your persona and get people familiar with your chosen character. Second, write dialogue script and scene instructions. How will the character walk in? What will they say? What's the location/background? You're creating a rich story before opening Studio. This way, you have outlined your props and backgrounds, character personalities and scene instructions.

Then for a very straightforward interaction, you drag and drop selected character. Drag and drop selected background (there's another step if you use your own or when exporting, it can be a transparent export which then will overlay any background in your learning output).
Import audio and allow the default for auto animation and lip syncing. Hit play and adjust gestures as necessary by dropping and dragging any number of the 400 animations. Export as flv or swf, and you're done with your first animation! As time goes on, you'll learn to use the camera changes, tweening and multiple scene and stage development.


BSF: What services does CodeBaby offer for those professionals who may be interestested in out sourcing the development?

AD: If the client provides the storyboard, we'll develop the animation. They provide their own audio or we'll source professional voice talent for them. We also create props, minor to major modifications such as glasses, aging, new clothes all the way to face wraps which means creating a character likeness of a real person, and we also develop new characters based on the client's developed persona.


BSF: What features are current users of CodeBay Production Studio asking for at this point in time?

These features will eventually be available in upcoming new versions. The most asked for new features are more character with different body sizes and additional gestures that allow for more character movement. I won't go into detail on these yet, but with our new releases, we will be satisfying these requests.


BSF: In closing- please summarize for us why eLearning Specialists should consider using CodeBaby for their projects?

AD: If you want to create amazing learning that truly helps learners retain information while enjoying the development process as you create engaging scenes and interactions, CodeBaby is the solution. Contact us for a trial to experience this for yourself!

An Interview with Audrey Dalton from CodeBaby Part 1

I had the pleasure of meeting Audrey Dalton, Product Marketing Director at CodeBaby during the DevLearn 09 Conference and had a chance to sit down and talk to her about her role and the CodeBaby platform for eLearning.


BSF: Hello Audrey, can you share with us your position and tell us a little background information about CodeBaby and the company?

AD: Responsible for all product marketing functions for the eLearning product line: Product Release Planning and Marketing, Demand generation, MarCom, Tradeshow & Event Planning, Online Community Relations, Curriculum Design, and Corporate Marketing Activities. Essentially, I'm the jack of all trades for the eLearning product marketing line and additionally have oversight for the education sector. Since we're a growing company, I'm taking on a multitude of roles at this time. Most importantly, I enjoy working with clients, our eLearning developer partners and reseller in Australia, Symmetree, to showcase and promote new uses and ideas for using CodeBaby characters in eLearning programs. In this role, I leverage my prior eLearning project management experience to facilitate their success stories and understand the customer perspective when marketing and gathering research for future product releases.

CodeBaby's history is quite interesting. CodeBaby began as a incubation project within Bioware, a Canadian company based in Edmonton, Alberta. In creating memorable 3D characters for their story-driven games, Bioware founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk noticed that those interactive characters created a powerful digital engagement and emotional response with players. In 2001, CodeBaby officially spun off as a completely separate entity. Our web product consists of digital character-driven "Conversations" that are directed at engaging customers, while driving specific objectives such as lead capture, click-to-buy, up/cross-sell, and customer self service. This product is sold on a SaaS / monthly subscription model, and integrates with a customer's site via a single line of code.

The product that I'm responsible for is the eLearning product - CodeBaby Production Studio.
CodeBaby makes the creation of animated, 3D digital characters accessible to a variety of companies who want to make their training content come to life. CodeBaby Production Studio is a timeline-based, drag-and-drop production environment that puts the capabilities of a highly skilled, 3D artist in the hands of a eLearning/training content developer. Studio comes with a library of 20+ standard characters, and 400+ animation sequences. Lip synch to recorded audio files is driven programmatically by the software, condensing hundreds of hours of animation work into only about an hour per minute of finished content.


BSF: With the shift to eLearning happening in all kinds of markets how does CodeBaby fit into this move to online learning?

AD: Good question, CodeBaby Production Studio is a natural fit for online learning, informal learning, and easily exports into any cloud-based product. Since Production Studio exports your CodeBaby scenes as swf, flv and avi files, these can be used in virtually any learning delivery. If you want the CodeBaby character to introduce classroom instruction delivered from your cloud-based presentation tool, that's easily done. If you want to create up to the minute communication announcements for your company or school, just export the CodeBaby as a swf and export to your learning portal. If you want to create more complex scenario based scenes and export into a traditional rapid eLearning or authoring tool, it's perfectly suited. As long as the medium has to do with learning, and it's for internal use, CodeBaby interactive characters are a highly effective addition to any learning program.

BSF: What do you see are the benefits of developers using CodeBaby for their eLearning projects?

AD: Are you speaking from a technical aspect or instructional design aspect? If from a technical aspect, Studio is very rich in development possibilities. For a creative, experienced developer, they'll truly enjoy playing with the 400 animations and 24 stock characters, ability to create multiple scenes and stages and the capability of producing bulk renders and exports. We have developer options to create new outfits for the characters if they use graphics programs like Maya or 3ds Max. Just the other day, one of our eLearning partners said that they've explored the program so much and have extensively studied and utilized the gestures and animations that they are now incorporating neurolinguistic programming theory into the movements in order to enhance the learning transmission. Additionally, he said that he's really looking forward to the additional animations that will available in upcoming versions.

From an instructional design perspective, we have found from our own research, from customer experience, and from Byron Reeves at Stanford from his paper the "The Benefits of Interactive Online Characters", that character interfaces bring social intelligence to online interactions. Social intelligence determines engagement, attention in learning, and persistence in relationships. Compelling social interactions are as important in online transactions as they are to teachers in real life. Bottom line, socially intelligent, interactive characters foster learning and adoption of new information and behavioral skills. We consistently hear from customers that performance improved, attention increased and they saved money when comparing online instruction with CodeBaby characters to instructor-led training or using video production. Essentially, there are no limits with how CodeBaby characters are used: as peer instructors, experts, multiple character role plays in which students learn in a non-threatening environment, in immersive simulations, sales training, customer service training, organizational change, employee orientation, best practices, compliance training, etc.


To be continued.....

Totally Tubular with iPevo Bluetooth Speakers

The number of new Bluetooth devices that roll out each and every week is astonishing. If you want to keep you can go to the official Bluetooth Site and check out all of the new products. Since doing the iPevo Point 2 View Webcam review, iPevo was kind enough to send me the iPevo Tubular Wireless Speakers to review, which takes advantage of Bluetooth, to stream the audio from your iPhone, IPod Touch, BlackeBerry or your PC to their speakers. I have to tell you when Bluetooth was first introduced I was not a real fan. I'm sure many of you spent countless hours as I did trying to pair up your Bluetooth devices. But Bluetooth has come a long way in the past couple of years with vast improvements in speed and pairing your device.

With this in mind, I set off to take a look at the iPevo Tubular Wireless Speakers which when paired with your audio device lets you transmit audio to the speakers without the need for a physical connection. The iPevo Tubular Wireless Speakers has a unique design and lives up to its name-you see the two individual speakers when stored are in the shape of a tube. The iPevo Tubular Wireless Speakers design works well and makes it easy to store the hidden USB cable and Mini RCA jack to connect the two halves of the speakers together. The built-in rubber spools on each speaker makes it easy to store the cables.The iPevo Tubular Wireless Speakers ships with a built in rechargeable battery which should give you 6 - 8 hours of listening pleasure. When it is time to recharge the battery you simply plug in the USB cable into your computer and charge it up. Each of the iPevo Tubular Wireless Speakers output up to 3 watts of sound which should be enough to fill a small room with your music.
for about
As recommended I initially charged the iPevo Tubular Wireless Speakers for about 2 hours to charge the battery. The indicators on the iPevo Tubular Wireless Speakers will let you know when the speakers are fully charged.Once charged I took out my BlackBerry Curve and started the pairing process to the speakers. The steps to do the pairing were prominently printed in the speakers and withing 30 seconds I was up and running. Pairing the iPevo Tubular Wireless Speakers with my BlackBerry was a cinch! Now the moment of truth! I opened my media player on my BlackBerry Curve and started to play a song and lo and behold the music was directed to the iPevo Tubular Wireless Speakers. The volume controls on the iPevo Tubular Wireless Speakers worked well and the sound quality was very good.

My next attempt to use the iPevo Tubular Wireless Speakers was with my MacBook. Once again I went through the pairing process very quickly and then went to my Sound Preferences and selected th iPevo speakers as my sound output. I fired up iTunes and had the music streamed to the iPevo Tubular Wireless Speakers. It truly was a very easy process and one that gives you the flexibility to play your music with just about any music device. Based on my experience I would say that you can successfully stream your audio from about 20 feet from the sound source. I was thinking that this would be a great device to use with the iPod Touch in the classroom especially for students that might be using Proloquo2go.com. Imagine a student sitting at their desk with the iPevo Wireless Speakers using their portable augmentative communication device and not having the burden to be physically connected to speakers. Let me know what you think.

Collaborating Web 2.0 Style

Since reviewing Tazzle IT I have had numerous conversations with Bruce Haendel about Tazzle IT and the whole mobile phone market. I have enjoyed getting to know Bruce and we have had some great conversations about marketing, technology, and BlackBerry's. Just the other night I connected with Bruce over Skype and some how we got into a conversation about how he could quickly inform others about his new and innovative product called Tazzle IT. I showed him some of the video demos that I have put together and he asked me what it would take to put something like that together. After some discussion over Skype we decided to put together a presentation that would include a video that he put together explaining how to use Tazzle IT.

As much as I use Web 2.0 technologies, I am always amazed what can be accomplished with these incredible collaboration tools. I suggested to Bruce who lives in Japan that we put the presentation together using Google Presentation. I signed into my Google Docs account and quickly shared the presentation with Bruce and we were on our way to creating the slide presentation. We did run in t a little snag every now and again with Google Docs and decided to use Etherpad to collaboratively work on the text for the slides. I quickly set up the Etherpad session and we were able in real time to work and edit the text for the slides. Once Bruce and I agreed on the copy, I was able to copy the text from Etherpad and paste it into the Google Presentation screen. That worked like a charm! Since we wanted to spruce up the Google Presentation, Bruce was able to drop into the Skype window picture files that I could then add to the presentation. By this time we were really humming and the presentation was moving along nicely. For the last slide we decided to insert one of the video's that Bruce had produced that he had uploaded to YouTube. Within seconds I was able to search for the Tazzle IT video within Google Presentation and insert it in the last slide. Adding a couple of corporate logos to the slide deck gave the Tazzle Presentation a polished look at we were then ready to publish it for the world to see. In about a hour, Bruce and I were able to put together this highly informative piece about Tazzle IT using several Web 2.0 technologies. When I reflect on what we did all I can say is Wow! Check out the Tazzle IT $10 dollar off promotion by clicking here.

Google Docs -Adds File Storage

As I begin to use Google Docs for more and more of my work I am amazed by the feature set and the additional features that Google keeps adding to the application. Just last week, Google announced that it is now possible to upload and store all kinds of files in your Google Doc account. Google now gives you 250 MB of storage space for your files and you can purchase additional space if you need it. While you can upload just about any type of document, Google will only allow you to edit files with the following formats: .docx, .xlsx, .doc, .odt, xls, .ods, .ppt, .csv, .html, .txt, and .rtf.
So now if you need to store you files in native format it is easy to do- simply click on the Upload button and a way you go. Let me know how you intend to use this new Google Doc feature!