According to Karim, our head of development, a widget is like a “Broadcast in a box”. You can embed a widget or place this box on your website. When a user clicks on it, the box opens up to reveal your Broadcast.

What you see immediately below is a widget. Go ahead and click on it. You’ll see that the Broadcast will start to play.

We’ve just released enhancements this morning. I’d like to highlight three particular ones that I think will have the greatest impact for both producers and viewers of Broadcasts.

1. Better Tracking of Broadcast Views

As a producer of a Broadcast, you may be interested in knowing when and how many times your Broadcast has been viewed. Well, we came up with a new and more transparent design to display this information to you. For each Broadcast that you produce/create, you can see the number of times it was viewed and when it was viewed. We also distinguish between “all views” and “unique views.” While “all views” displays the number of times a Broadcast has been viewed, “unique views” displays the number of different users who viewed that particular Broadcast.

To access these helpful statistics, click on the Stats icon located next to any one of your saved Broadcasts.

Here’s a snapshot of the statistics page:

2. Full-Browser Mode for Widgets

Our widgets are now capable of being viewed in a full-browser mode. This enables users to view a Broadcast within the maximum height and width of their browser size, allowing for an engaging experience. Note that Broadcasts that are viewed on www.faculte.com can also be viewed in full-browser mode as well.

3. New Color Palette

We’ve introduced a new color palette/picking tool that you’ll use to designate a background or font color for your Broadcast. This new design allows you to easily select a specific color of your choice with unlimited flexibility.

Here’s a snapshot of the new color palette/picking tool:

If you have ideas on how we can improve the Broadcast Studio, our tool to create Broadcasts, or want to see additional features on our website, please submit a suggestion via “Suggestions” at the bottom of your homepage.

Best,

holo help

Greetings to all! My name is Holo Help and I will be your guide to understanding new product features as they’re rolled out. Be sure to check out this blog regularly. I’ll post weekly updates, and more if necessary, to showcase various improvements to our website and the Broadcast Studio.

As always, we welcome any suggestions and questions you might have – just click on the “Tell Us About It” button located under Suggestions at the bottom of the page. Also, feel free to email me directly at holohelp(at)faculte.com.

Cheers,
Holo Help

Here is the deal: if I want to learn about how to cook “chicken tikka masala”, I can find 54 videos on Youtube, 49 videos on ehow, and, you’d better believe it, 1,809 videos on expert village. This is very cool- as a consumer, my life has just become so much richer and easier thanks to online media innovations AND the online ads marketing dollars that are paying for them on my behalf.

But if I want to learn about how to put together a killer presentation to pitch my latest business plan to a VC, or how to create a viral marketing campaign for my product, or understanding the legal implications of conducting a clinical trial, where do I go? It is true that I can search the web, the blogsphere, wikipedia, etc., but it still takes me hours/days to make sense out of all this information. I need a professional to show me, teach me, mentor me, advise me. And I am willing to pay! But where do I find one?

This is where Faculte comes in. In short, here is what we are trying to accomplish:

1. Make it easy for professionals to teach other professionals online what they already know
2. Make it easy for employees in a company to share/exchange knowledge with other employees, and with customers and partners, in an informal, yet secure, rich environment (LMS is dead!)
3. Make professional knowledge accessible and affordable to everyone
4. Build an ad-free knowledge marketplace where professionals can earn money teaching other professionals in their field of expertise

We want to give professionals what consumers already have: a wealth of technologies, services, and content which was afforded to them by the Web 2.0 movement over the past 5 years (media, communications, user-generated content). We call it “Business Communications 2.0″!

Swamy had a brilliant idea, as he often does: “why not start the blog by telling stories about how Faculte started”. From his perspective, this was the most interesting thing about Faculte (of course I beg to differ, but this is another story for another post). As a technology company in the Silicon Valley, we are expected to blog, but we decided to delay this activity until we had a product to launch. Now that we’ve launched, we need to start blogging… Argh!

I left Lawson Software in late 2006 and spent a few months thinking about what I wanted to do next. I was intrigued with what was going on in the Web 2.0 space, and my good friend and colleague Steve Borsch was a great source of education for me. Jeff Kleck and I had been brainstorming about applying Web 2.0 technologies and concepts in the business world and for professional use. He introduced me to Mark Valentine, and the three of us quickly narrowed our focus on the challenge facing professional workers in learning and keeping themselves informed and up-to-date. We envisioned a “marketplace of knowledge” for professionals, where people would teach and mentor others. We quickly jotted down the challenges: 1. Would-be teachers need easy online tools to help them “teach” directly on the Web, the way good writers use blogging tools to write directly to the Web; and 2. Would-be teachers need better incentives to spend their time and energy teaching others online than earning ad-based income! Enough with online ads! Stop being brainwashed by Google - you cannot make a living with AdSense!

In early 2007, Jeff, Mark and I decided that the idea was worthwhile pursuing, and Faculte was born. Since the three of us are business software guys (read: over 40!), we decided that we needed a young talented technologist who had been living and breathing Web 2.0. I posted an ad on Crunchboard looking for such a person, and I met some interesting people during the process. Emil Tamas emailed me that he was interested in talking… he gave me his Skype handle and I contacted him. We talked a few times on Skype and I enjoyed our interaction. I suggested we meet somewhere to talk further. He agreed but mentioned that it might be a problem. It turned out that Emil lived in Romania and had never traveled outside his hometown (Alba Iulia) before (he was 24 year old). I was shocked! Because of his depth of knowledge about the technology, his fluency in English and lack of accent, his correct use of American slang and understanding of the American culture, it had NEVER crossed my mind that he did NOT live in the Bay Area. Why would it? I had explicitly asked for a local when I posted my ad. Emil dismissed my concern by simply saying: “that is besides the point. I know what you need and I can help you!”

Emil joined the team. At the time he worked alone. Things were a bit rocky at the beginning, and on a couple of occasions we almost gave up. He liked the vision of a “universal marketplace of knowledge” where people earned money teaching others. He enjoyed working with Media and Flash. I started calling him Emilpedia - he seemed to either know everything, or was incredibly effective at pretending to know everything. Hiding behind his computer screen and armed with google, he was incredibly fast at searching, finding, and digesting any technical issue, and discussing it in real-time as if he had known about it for years. I liked his attitude, energy, passion, and mind. I knew I was going to face trouble with his time management and organization skills. But we were just planting the first seeds for our startup, and this problem was secondary.

Emil would become an important character in Faculte’s narrative. You will hear from him and learn more about him and his team in Cluj Napoca, Romania where our development center is located.