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• Your feedback matters!
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• The art of telling your story
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• We have officially launched!
• Life Is a Pitch!
• Version 3.0 is released – and we are out of Beta!
• New Look, New Features!

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

Stop the junk mail, send me a link instead!

June 15th, 2009   Filed Under Non-profit  

Every week I am bombarded with mail from non-profit organizations seeking donations. Many of these are fine organizations that I happily support every year. Like many people, the majority of my philanthropy is distributed in December in the spirit of the holiday season. So why do these organizations insist on burying me with solicitations that are ignored? Surprisingly, environmental organizations that should be the most conscientious of the waste created by the endless newsletters and appeals are just as guilty as the rest of the NGOs. Sometimes I wonder if my donations do nothing more than pay for postage, paper and ink!

With all of the impressive technology available in the 21st century, why do they insist on perpetuating this sea of junk mail? Yes, the pictures of malnourished children and lost polar bears do tug at our heart in an effective means of creating empathy. But how much more effective would the message be if it was delivered using a personal video appeal? Or an engaging presentation that I could watch on my computer? Inexpensive, engaging, trackable, and green, video appeals are the better way to solicit your supporters. What better time is there than this economic slow down for non-profits to leverage the new technologies to cost effectively improve their communications.

Our Top 5 Names… well 4…

June 8th, 2009   Filed Under Name Our Company  

In case you haven’t been following our naming saga, I’ll fill you in very quickly. Over April and May we decided to hold a contest to rename our company. The prize was $1000. It was a fun experiment in crowd-sourcing and a great way to open up our discussions to a fresh set of minds. After reviewing the entries, we decided to stick with our current name Faculte. Nevertheless, we all had our favorite contenders and as a consolation prize will give out $200 each to our top 5. I haven’t heard back from the 5th, so I’ll just list out our top 4. Here they are:

Talkdeck
Talkdeck was one of my favorites from the beginning. It was very clear, concise, just 2 syllables and described vividly what a Faculte Broadcast in many cases is, which is a “talking deck”, where you use our narration, annotation and direct from webcam recordings to make it talk. The ‘deck’ part comes from the term “slidedeck” commonly used to represent powerpoint presentations for sales or investor pitches. It works well as a product name but was limiting as a company name because it left no room for our larger vision and future offerings in the business communications, training and marketing space.

Vivapitch
To me Vivapitch represented a pitch come to life, like a product, sales or investor pitch. It has a very lively sentiment and resonates well when you say it. However, the word ‘pitch’ has many other contexts ranging from sound to sports.

Motionpost
We strive to make the delivery of marketing content, training content and multimedia communications as simple as publishing a blog post. You don’t need to contact IT or go through a webmaster to write and publish to the web, so why should you have to do that to produce and publish marketing and training content? You shouldn’t. That’s why we liked Motionpost. A product demo, online class, or video email can be produced as easily as it is to produce a blog post. A Faculte Broadcast, in essence, is a Motionpost that can be instantly published and modified on the fly.

Communakit
A Faculte Broadcast is like a communications kit, where you can bring together different pieces of communication whether they be video, audio or documents and easily share it for instant viewing online. This name, again, was great for a product name but not quite as flexible for our company name.

We’d love to hear your comments about our top 4 picks!

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.