Last week's announcement of a strategic alliance between Globecomm and Play Network to integrate their music and digital signage services into our Tempo platform, represents a giant step forward in the evolution of the Enterprise Video Platform, and creates compelling value propositions for the clients we serve.
When we first conceived Tempo, we placed ourselves five or six years in the future and asked: "What will large enterprises need in terms of a video delivery system"? One of our guiding principles was that of "One Platform". We were living in a world where there were streaming and webcasting platforms for Corporate Communications, proprietary systems for Interactive Distance Learning, and Digital Signage systems with less than elegant implementations. We believed that all of these applications would converge into a single platform, kind of like Microsoft Office. We were correct. And as we have evolved our philosophy, items like third-party training content, mobile app delivery, and customer facing applications - including in-store music and advanced digital display systems - have become essential elements of our roadmap. The Tempo/Play Network alliance adds the Customer Experience elements of in-store music and advanced signage to our platform.
This announcement is also significant because we are now not only providing the technology, we are providing the content. The future will be defined by how users interact with content. Together with Play Network, we are now in the business of defining that experience. Nothing excites us more.
It has also been exciting to see the market response to this announcement. My favorite interaction was with a Fortune 50 retailer who said "With Tempo, I can replace five existing systems with a single platform from a single vendor." That is the power of One Platform.
Lastly, it is great to be working with the folks at Play Network. We could not have hoped for a better partner. They are a focused, knowledgable, and forward-leaning organization. I see the fire in the eyes of our team when we walk out of meetings with them. It is inspiring.
Ed Behan, Vice President of Enterprise Services, Globecomm
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Thursday, July 18, 2013
The TEMPO Courseware Tool
Courseware development tools have usually been expensive necessities for the learning and development department. Many tools are priced per courseware author and often cost in the thousands of dollars per seat. Some actually charge per learner as well which can add up to tens of thousands of additional dollars. In addition, many vendors charge annual maintenance fees for the tools. In my experience, these costs can be quite substantial.
Globecomm’s TEMPO approach changes all that. You can use Microsoft PowerPoint® as your courseware authoring tool, a software tool that’s ubiquitous in most organizations. That means that your marginal cost for courseware authoring is zero. So those friendly little ppt files can be your courseware files as well.
If you don’t happen to have PowerPoint® available in your shop, I still have good news for you; I have tried TEMPO with OpenOfficeTM Impress files and it works well. It is available as a free download at www.openoffice.org . Since, Impress is an open source product, your courseware development tool investment can be exactly zero when you use TEMPO.
Of course, many products claim to be able to use PowerPoint presentations as input to their courseware system. But TEMPO takes it a step further. Not only are you creating your slides in PowerPoint®, but you can create your quizzes as ppt files as well.
So how does that work, you ask?
Those clever engineers at Globecomm have come up with a easy to use coding scheme. To signal to TEMPO that you want a slide to be a quiz, you just insert a text string such as %Q. at the beginning of the slide title. You label answers with similar short little tags. You specify distractors in the same way. It’s simple and straight forward. The same coding scheme works for both interactive live broadcasts and interactive, on-demand modules.
So you already have your TEMPO courseware authoring tool – and you already know how to use it!
Rick Darby
Rick Darby is President of SEDATA, LLC , consultants specializing in video-centric Interactive Distance Learning and technology-based training.
Globecomm’s TEMPO approach changes all that. You can use Microsoft PowerPoint® as your courseware authoring tool, a software tool that’s ubiquitous in most organizations. That means that your marginal cost for courseware authoring is zero. So those friendly little ppt files can be your courseware files as well.
If you don’t happen to have PowerPoint® available in your shop, I still have good news for you; I have tried TEMPO with OpenOfficeTM Impress files and it works well. It is available as a free download at www.openoffice.org . Since, Impress is an open source product, your courseware development tool investment can be exactly zero when you use TEMPO.
Of course, many products claim to be able to use PowerPoint presentations as input to their courseware system. But TEMPO takes it a step further. Not only are you creating your slides in PowerPoint®, but you can create your quizzes as ppt files as well.
So how does that work, you ask?
Those clever engineers at Globecomm have come up with a easy to use coding scheme. To signal to TEMPO that you want a slide to be a quiz, you just insert a text string such as %Q. at the beginning of the slide title. You label answers with similar short little tags. You specify distractors in the same way. It’s simple and straight forward. The same coding scheme works for both interactive live broadcasts and interactive, on-demand modules.
So you already have your TEMPO courseware authoring tool – and you already know how to use it!
Rick Darby
Rick Darby is President of SEDATA, LLC , consultants specializing in video-centric Interactive Distance Learning and technology-based training.
Thursday, July 11, 2013
TEMPO Courseware Development
In my last post I told you how TEMPO uses PowerPoint and a simple coding scheme to allow you to build state-of-the-art interactive courseware while eliminating the need for expensive courseware development tools. In this post I’d like to show you how the TEMPO courseware development approach expands your reach and solves many common training problems.
Most mature training organizations that have a large number of people to train on a consistent basis have gravitated to video-centric training. There have been some very good reasons for this. People are used to getting their information from video. Its production techniques are well understood. The huge installed base of consumer television equipment has had pricing advantages. The broadcast industry has been a driving force for innovation for years.
But just as the bandwidth for video centric training across the Internet has become affordable for even the smallest organizations, the playing field has expanded. The job of delivering training has become much, much tougher.
More and more people are on the go and need training wherever they are: in the office, at home or on the road. Now you need to deliver training to TVs, desktops, laptops, smart phones and tablets. Most of these are attached to the Internet, but not all the time. Not everyone is on the same continent, let alone in the same satellite footprint. That means not everyone can participate at the same time, so you need the on-demand experience to be as rich as the live experience.
There have been piecemeal approaches to delivering training across all of these environments, so it’s possible to address each scenario individually with point solutions. But it is most ideal to address them with a single, integrated, video-based training and delivery platform. You need an enterprise-wide solution. You need a system that understands that it must be part of a complex environment with subsidiaries, divisions, regions and districts. You need a platform that integrates with your learning management system and yet can also track the training activities with more granular data.
TEMPO is the first of its kind video-centric delivery platform that addresses all these training needs using a single integrated tool. It allows you to deliver synchronous training to a remote class or a remote individual. Mobile workers on laptops, smart phones and tablets can participate in a live training event or catch up on their own time by viewing an interactive video-on-demand.
For the first time, there is an integrated platform that provides the high quality video-centric training demanded by business in the 21st century.
Rick Darby
Rick Darby is President of SEDATA, LLC , consultants specializing in video-centric Interactive Distance Learning and technology-based training.
Most mature training organizations that have a large number of people to train on a consistent basis have gravitated to video-centric training. There have been some very good reasons for this. People are used to getting their information from video. Its production techniques are well understood. The huge installed base of consumer television equipment has had pricing advantages. The broadcast industry has been a driving force for innovation for years.
But just as the bandwidth for video centric training across the Internet has become affordable for even the smallest organizations, the playing field has expanded. The job of delivering training has become much, much tougher.
More and more people are on the go and need training wherever they are: in the office, at home or on the road. Now you need to deliver training to TVs, desktops, laptops, smart phones and tablets. Most of these are attached to the Internet, but not all the time. Not everyone is on the same continent, let alone in the same satellite footprint. That means not everyone can participate at the same time, so you need the on-demand experience to be as rich as the live experience.
There have been piecemeal approaches to delivering training across all of these environments, so it’s possible to address each scenario individually with point solutions. But it is most ideal to address them with a single, integrated, video-based training and delivery platform. You need an enterprise-wide solution. You need a system that understands that it must be part of a complex environment with subsidiaries, divisions, regions and districts. You need a platform that integrates with your learning management system and yet can also track the training activities with more granular data.
TEMPO is the first of its kind video-centric delivery platform that addresses all these training needs using a single integrated tool. It allows you to deliver synchronous training to a remote class or a remote individual. Mobile workers on laptops, smart phones and tablets can participate in a live training event or catch up on their own time by viewing an interactive video-on-demand.
For the first time, there is an integrated platform that provides the high quality video-centric training demanded by business in the 21st century.
Rick Darby
Rick Darby is President of SEDATA, LLC , consultants specializing in video-centric Interactive Distance Learning and technology-based training.
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