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Recent Posts

• Maintaining a professional and up-to-date help section in a start-up company
• Improving the Producer
• Collaborate like never before
• Purchasing content has never been easier – neither has tracking your purchases!
• Any questions?
• Searchable Channels – our latest innovation
• Latest release – Awesome Annotations!
• Combining Multiple Broadcasts in a Series
• We’re pioneers, my friends.
• Pre-recorded presentations; a better experience for you AND your audience?
• Your Faculte – Your Brand!
• Your feedback matters, Part 2
• Your feedback matters!
• Lesson Learned: When YouTube is NOT good for your marketing videos
• The art of telling your story
• How to turn a lifeless PowerPoint into a lively video
• We have officially launched!
• Life Is a Pitch!
• Version 3.0 is released – and we are out of Beta!
• New Look, New Features!

Latest release – Awesome Annotations!

March 30th, 2010   Filed Under Faculte Story, New Features  

Early this morning we deployed the latest version of our platform – with many small tweaks, and a total makeover of one of our renowned features.

Annotations

Our praised annotation pen – used for highlighting your message – has gone through a major makeover. Some people are good at free-hand drawing with their mouse – but most people are not. Now you can draw arrows, circles and check-marks with a click-and-drag of the mouse. You can even zoom in on the content of your page. So simple – yet so powerful and impressive!

Smaller tweaks

We have also added a group of new, beautiful sound loops to our Audio Background collection – so that your Broadcasts can be as professional and beautiful as  possible!

When producing a Broadcast, you can now sort your files and broadcasts by Label. Easier navigation makes your creation process simpler and faster.

Next on our list

Ladies and gentlemen, there’s more goodies to come! In just two short weeks, we will announce our latest big feature – our developers are working around the clock on it. Stay tuned for more!

We’re pioneers, my friends.

February 15th, 2010   Filed Under Customers, Education, Faculte, Faculte Story  

“Vernon, please help me. Can you figure out a way I can teach from home? Pleeeease?”, Donna Kato claims she whined to her husband, after being delayed for hours at a desolate airport, trying to make her way back home after teaching a class. “I love to teach, it’s just what it took to get to my students and home again that was really getting my goat.”, she writes in a recent blog post.

Vernon obviously could not say no to a tired, whining wife, and he started to look for solutions. They tried producing videos; it turned out to be way too expensive. They thought about creating downloadable pdf’s; they were so uninspiring. They kept searching and Donna kept traveling.

Then they stumbled across Faculte’s BETA site. To this day, none of us really know how they found us, but find us they did, and this has turned out to be a very exciting partnership for  Faculte and what would eventually become CraftEdu.

Imagine the following scenario; you are at home, taking the afternoon off. You are feeling terribly creative, but have neither inspiration nor knowledge to actually create something. You step into the living room, coming to a sudden halt in the doorway: Right there, on your desk, sits metal clay artist Angela Crispin, polymer clay wizard Bettina Welker, fiber art ace Beth Wheeler, scrap-booking champion Brigitte Doss-Johnson, wirework genius Debbie Tlach, fabric printing authority Heidi Rand – in fact, there are about 50 amazing craft artists sitting right there on your desk. (needless to say; your desk is pretty full!) The artist are all eager to show you their artwork, and teach you how you can create it yourself.

This is the vision of CraftEdu - except the instructors will be available inside, not on top of, your computer, so it will not be as crowded as described above.

CraftEdu is founded by Vernon Ezell and Donna Kato, and as a modest beginning they have included 50 Arts and Crafts experts in their team. These experts have picked out their favorite pieces, and with the use of Faculte’s Broadcast Studio they are now in the process of creating online, on-demand classes available to anyone with a computer. The instructions contain step-by-step images, verbal explanations, videos – and lots of inspiration. You can follow them in your own pace, navigate the instructions to see parts of it several times, and revisit the class multiple times.

Being part of this project, the Faculte team has had the opportunity to have quite a few sneak peaks – and believe us, both the art work and the classes look awesome. Everyone is looking forward to the CraftEdu BETA launch in just a few weeks.

A few weeks ago, Donna truly realized what she got herself into, that long evening of whining in a desolate airport. To use her own words; “…there is nothing like it in the craft or art community. We’re pioneers, my friends. This may well change the way all internet instruction is presented.”

The Faculte Team is proud to be powering this amazing project!

Visit CraftEdu to learn more;

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Pre-recorded presentations; a better experience for you AND your audience?

February 10th, 2010   Filed Under Education, Faculte, Faculte Story, Presentations  

For a student – and for most professionals – being able to give a good presentation or pitch is a key element of success.

Some elements can be learned through reading theory; how much text should you use per slide? How many slides are appropriate? How should your slides be structured? You can even read theory about how you should walk, talk, stand and dress, in order to make the right impression on your audience.

There is one thing, however, that only comes with experience; the knowledge of how you react to holding a presentation. Will you be able to stick to the script? Do you take detours; and where do these detours take you? Will you keep a fluent pace, or will you let your nerves get to you? Even when you are well prepared – and experienced! –  your nerves can play tricks on you, and you end up rushing through the whole presentation, skipping several important points – or spending all the dedicated time on the first few slides, thus never reaching your conclusion. Not to mention all the unnecessary uh’s and ehm’s that tend to jump out of your mouth when you are nervous.

For the fall semester 2009, the Master of Science and Engineering Management Class at Marquette University used, for the first time, Faculte’s Broadcast Studio for their final Presentations. Approximately half of the groups chose to create and pre-record their presentation using Faculte, while the rest distributed powerpoint slides only. All presentations were posted on a class website, and some of them were Presented live.

Instead of me telling you how the experiment went, I will let the students do it in their own words:

“In the future I would attempt to use faculte first rather than using powerpoint.”

“I enjoyed the Faculte presentations much better than the non-faculte presentations. The Faculte presentations seemed to flow better.”

“The overall process significantly added to the quality of the presentations. If students/teams used this for all their projects, additional quality gains would accrue.”

Clearly both the students and the Faculte team were pleased with the results!

When I talked to Professor Polzcynski right after the live presentations, he had made a couple of observations that I found particularly interesting. Usually, with my theatre background, I have always claimed that “being live, in person, on stage, always gives the best results”. However, I think the Professor proved me somewhat wrong.

First, he told me that in one of the groups all but one student were traveling through work. The one student being present not an accustomed presenter, and strongly disliked being in front of an audience. Imagine his relief that their whole presentation was already created, and all he had to do was click a link and press play!

The second observation the professor shared was this: When you do a recording, you have the chance to review your work. This means that a) you write a good script and prepare well for the recording – you will actually have to listen to your own voice! and b) you re-do it if it is not good.

This resulted in the groups using Faculte having presentations that were within the dedicated time, following a comfortable pace, explaining all important points, not de-touring into unimportant details – not to mention, without the uh’s and ehm’s.

The professor said that all the presentations were good – but in the groups that used Faculte, there was not a single incident of student’s nerves or unpreparedness getting in the way of the presentation.

Knowing how you react to holding a presentation comes with experience – and I still believe that being present, in front of your audience, gives a good result. However, in using Faculte for your Presentations, you can relax! Be your charming self next to the screen, and let your nerves kick in when it is time for the questions after the presentation.

Unless, of course, you have prepared another Broadcast, with answers to all the questions you might get. Then you’re all set.

Click here to see the student’s Presentations

Your Faculte – Your Brand!

January 28th, 2010   Filed Under Faculte, Faculte Story, New Features, Presentations  

One of the things I appreciate most about working in a start-up company is that one of our main focuses is Feature Development. This means that a lot of the changes that appear with every new deployment are visible – this time around, incredibly visible!

Our latest invention is developed with larger organizations in mind; preferring to use their own brand. They want their employees or affiliates to see their Company Brand, and not the Faculte Brand, when they are in the content creation process. With the changes to our Branded Templates, that is exactly what they are able to do.

The feature is of course there for every Premium Account to use, large organization or not – providing a nice way to re-decorate your work environment! Personally, spending hours on our Platform every day, it was such a relief to be able to change the color of my background, header and footer. Yes, my boss hated the bright pink. No, I don’t really care. (Okay, fine, I cared enough to change it to purple.)

To change the whole look and feel of your Premium Faculte Account, go to Settings and Branded Templates – and go ahead and create your personalized style. The changes are reflected right away, making it a simple and immediate process.

We all hope you will enjoy the new feature, and stay tuned – there are more changes to come. Our developers are doing an amazing job!

Your feedback matters!

November 24th, 2009   Filed Under Faculte, Faculte Story, New Features, Presentations, Video  

Over the past weeks and months, our faithful customer base has given us the most valuable thing a young start-up can get; they have given us their honest feedback. Yes, sometimes it hurts, but we have kept our ears open and listened.

Today, we launched the first of a larger series of customer-requested changes. Our development team have been focused, and will keep focusing, on what YOU want and what YOU need. So please, everybody, keep the honest feedback coming! It is the only way to make our product perfect!

You told us that being able to add background music to your broadcasts would make them even more professional. So we added the Audio Background feature. When you edit your broadcast, go to Preferences and select Audio Background. We have given you a variety of music loops to choose from, and we do hope you will find your favorite amongst them! The selected Audio Loop will play continuously, without pausing in between the pages – even if the rest of the content is loading.

You told us that you’ve started having a LOT of files and broadcasts, and it is hard to manage them. We want you to create a lot of content – so of course we want to give you the possibility of managing it easily! Thus, we are now releasing Labels – so you can easily administer and access the files and broadcasts you want.

You told us that you love being able to add webcam recordings to your broadcasts, but that the first second of your recording – the one where you look at the timer, realize you’re recording, smile awkwardly, draw your breath – was so difficult to avoid. So instead of giving all our customers acting lessons (which may have been equally awkward?), we have now released Video Trimming. When you hit Record, and the countdown starts, just draw your breath and relax. You can trim away the first second of the video anyway!

There have also been several changes to your home page:

We hope these changes will make you a happy customer!

We promise to keep the improvements coming – if you promise to tell us what you want!

Life Is a Pitch!

September 21st, 2009   Filed Under Faculte, Faculte Story  

It’s day 2 of our 4-day trip to San Diego. We’re down here for this year’s DEMOfall conference, where we’ll be officially launching our company and product, Faculte’s Broadcast Studio.

At DEMO, we are to pitch our company on stage in front of a crowd of fellow businesses, media, press and investors. Independently we’ve developed pitches for each of these audiences like a press release, investor presentation, product demo video and information to help our sale guys. Every time we make a pitch, we get to showcase our own product. Our pitch is how effective you can make your pitch through Faculte.

Preparing for the DEMO on-stage presentation was no different than any other pitch we’ve had to prepare. We faced yet again the same challenges that everyone faces whenever they set out to create a pitch:

• How do I squeeze all this information in?

• How do I get my point across?

• How do I make this entertaining?

• How much time before I lose my audience?

DEMO handles part of the last challenge. They have assembled over 500 people to give us no more than 6 minutes of their time on stage. Our job is to captivate this audience with a moving speech and a powerful product demo.

Here are the lessons we picked up in our last few weeks of preparation:

Lesson #1: Unless you’re an experienced Orator, don’t have someone else write your script word-for-word.

You know your content and subject matter the best. Unless you have a masterful script writer, your writer won’t know how to write for your voice. I wrote the first draft of the script for our CEO, Maher, but it just didn’t sound right and he stumbled. He had to make it his own. You need to take it upon yourself to just get in front of a camera, start recording and talk your way through a few practice runs. The more times you rehearse, the more your speech will solidify itself and become ingrained in your head.

Lesson #2: Humor works well, BUT it’s always a fine line to walk

We all want to be funny. It lightens the tension for us, makes for a more entertaining pitch and keeps the audience interested. However, a lot of the time our humor is simply OUR humor, either an inside joke or overly contrived. If you want to add a bit of humor, make sure you field test it by doing a full run of your pitch to someone completely new to it. We’ve thrown in a subtle joke into our pitch. We only knew it worked, when we got laughs from strangers. Don’t forget to field test it!

Lesson #3: A pitch is a performance, BUT you’re not a very good actor

With a pitch, you want to emotionally engage the audience like great film or theatre. When on stage, you might use role playing or have planned dialogue between two people to emphasize a point. Be cautious of trying to be too much of an actor. Be sure to pick roles that you play every day. If you try and deviate too far, it will end up looking forced and unnatural, which is just plain painful to watch. In our pitch, I play the role of the marketing manager who has to make last minute changes to our pitch on request of the CEO. Guess what? That is my role. So it wasn’t much of a stretch!

Lesson #4: Practice, Practice, Practice!

Do I have to write the word practice more times? Grab your colleagues, sit them down and make them listen. Just be wary of the feedback you get. Not all of it will steer you in the right direction and can actually complicate the process more. Choose your practice audience for their ability to give educated feedback based on their experience.

Lesson #5: Drive home one strong message, not five weak ones

Pick one central theme. Open with it. Stress it in the middle. Close with it. There is always  too much to say and too many points to cover. Use this central theme as your filter mechanism. If a point you want to make doesn’t directly connect to the theme, scrap it.

The DEMO conference will be streaming live on their website starting tomorrow. Click here to go to the live stream: Faculte’s presentation is at 10:00 am on Wednesday, September 23rd. Tune-in to see us on stage and let us know what you think of the pitch!

Welcome to the future of learning: My first meeting with Faculte

June 22nd, 2009   Filed Under Faculte, Faculte Story  

There is a new blogger in the house: Anita!

I am a Norwegian girl who has the privilege to work at Faculte this summer through something called the Norwegian Entrepreneurship Program. I have education in both Innovation and in Drama and Theatre Communication, and when I read about Faculte and their vision to make it really easy to share knowledge online in a multimedia way, i was absolutely fascinated.

When I first contacted Faculte, back home in Norway in early may, to tell them I was interested in spending my summer with them, I immediately got a friendly response. I even got an access code to the broadcast studio so that I could present myself to the team before I got to San Francisco. I started working on it right away, and it was so much fun! I have always loved video and photography, but I have never learned it properly or used advanced tools, and here I suddenly had a platform that allowed me to do so many cool things, without any hassle. It was simple and understandable, yet my presentation - including video, images, documents, text and webcam recordings - turned out great. It turned out so great that it convinced Miki and Maher to “employ” me for the summer By the way, in case you’re curious and wanna have a look at it, I’ll post it as a widget in the bottom of this blogpost!

When writing this I am as exited, seeing that the new version 3.0 is coming along with all sorts of new great features. I love the fact that you now can annotate videos, and of course the drag-and-drop function! I still miss a “trim beginning and end of video” function, but Maher has promised me they’re working on it.

When I go back to Norway after the summer I will be starting up my own company again, doing practical, theatre based courses B2B covering themes as communication, body language and creativity. I need to make a new webpage, and it will definitely contain lots of broadcasts created in Faculte! It is such a great way of conveying you message, and it will make me and my company look professional at a low cost.

Having been in San Francisco working with Faculte only for a week and a half, I have already learned so much. The Faculte team takes such good care of us (us includes Sverre, the other Norwegian “working” here, and me), involving us in every aspect of their business. They let us contribute in discussions and decision-making, and considering the aim for our program, this is the perfect workplace.

At the moment I’m working on creating lots of tutorials – aiming to make them both informative and entertaining. I am also working on an online, on-demand conference. More info on this one is coming soon!

I am happy and excited and looking forward to our big launch in July!

Anita

And the new name is … Faculte!

June 2nd, 2009   Filed Under Faculte, Faculte Story  

Wait, did I just read that right?

Yes. We’ve decided to stick with our existing name Faculte. It wasn’t an easy decision because we got a lot of great suggestions in as part of our naming contest. We even narrowed it down to a shortlist of our favorites. However, when stacked up against “Faculte”, these names couldn’t evoke the same spirit we’ve come to love.

The Middle English Dictionary’s top two definitions of “Faculte” are: 1. The power, ability, facility, opportunity, possibility to do something 2. A field of knowledge or experience. We believe that the name “Faculte” captures in one word the essence of our entire mission, which is to enable professionals and organizations to easily share knowledge online. To give them the ability to inform, explain or educate in the most lively way.

We’re fully aware that some of you don’t have such a flattering impression of the word Faculte (or rather Faculty) because it conjures up images of unpleasant experiences dealing with the teaching and administrative force in your university days.

Let’s step away from that picture for a moment.

I want you to think of an inspiring professor, one that was so passionate and knowledgeable about the topic he or she was teaching that the experience was enjoyable and you understood their concepts right away. Now imagine hundreds or thousands of teachers just like that! Well that’s what happens when you enable experts to share their knowledge easily (and be able to have fun doing it!)

We want the word Faculte to inspire. Take a look at TED for example. We love TED. They bring you amazing talks from the world’s brightest minds. There are bright minds in your company and organization. Let’s give them the platform to share their knowledge! That’s what Faculte means to us.

So what about the prize money?!

We were very serious about finding a new or better name. Each of us even had our favorite contenders. So as a consolation prize, we’ve decided to award $200 each to our top 5 favorite names. In our next post we’ll take you through our top 5 and some notable runner-ups.

A Fireside Chat with the Team

April 16th, 2009   Filed Under Faculte, Faculte Story  

We’re officially launching in a couple months! It’s been about a year of developing out our product and trying to make it as simple as possible to explain things online. This is our first post behind the scenes as we get prepared to take our product from free trial to a great paid service for professionals to produce and distribute lively training and business communications.

I encourage you to try out our Broadcast Studio now while its completely open for anyone. We’d love to hear what you think! I was trying to come up with a creative and personal way to introduce the team as part of our first post and wanted to use our product to do it. So I spontaneously setup my laptop with built in webcam in our meeting room, plugged in another monitor and voila! I had my own production going. Without warning, I dragged in the team (reluctant as they were, they were great sports) and interviewed them on the spot. I call this a “Faculte Fireside Chat” and it’s going to be a regular occurrence on our blog so stay tuned.

Click below to see the first installment: