Rich Media On Demand

News and Events

Join Momindum at The eLearning Guild’s: DevLearn 2010 Conference and Expo

Momindum will be part of the DevLearn|2010 Conference and Expo, one of the largest annual e-Learning events in North America put together by The eLearning Guild Group. Around 1,600 attendees and 60 exhibitor companies from more than 20 countries will gather to learn and share the latest cutting-edge technologies of management, design and development in the eLearning industry.

This year’s event will take place at the San Francisco Marriot Marquis right in the heart of downtown San Francisco, from November 3-5, 2010. E-Learning managers, executives and practitioners will gather to discuss themes like Mobile and Social Learning, Performance Support and New Blended e-Learning, Authoring Tools, Rapid Development Tools, Online Training, Instructional Design and more…

Momindum invites you to join us at booth#412.

Our experts will be available to demonstrate our Rich Media Solutions, and explain how our software adds value to businesses by revolutionizing the way they train, communicate and market.

Case study

Sciences Po Case Study: Transforming Teaching into Knowledge Sharing

The prestigious French Institute of Political Studies of Paris, also known as Sciences Po, has selected Momindum’s K-base platform to improve their educational programs. This collaborative, rich media course management platform solves a variety of important challenges Sciences Po was facing to improve the efficiency of their course delivery.

When Momindum first met Sciences Po CTO Stephane Auzanneau and CDO Nicolas Catzaras at an exhibition, the French Institute was looking to improve their processes and capabilities in a few areas:

• Allow all students to view lectures even if there were not enough seats available for live lecture
• Facilitate the understanding of lectures for international students
• Leverage a technology flexible enough to adapt for students with learning disabilities
• Broadcast courses more easily and efficiently
• Capitalize discourses from famous personalities in academia to distribute to their students
• Transform static lectures to an interactive link between professors and students

After a thorough evaluation of the leading technologies available, Sciences Po concluded that in order to reach its objectives, Momindum’s innovative learning platform would be the best solution to provide Sciences Po students with unlimited access to courses, allow them to study at their own pace, and generate the collaboration necessary to enhance students’ engagement with professors. The collaborative features of K-base have transformed teaching to a knowledge-sharing process between professors and fellow students, therefore improving students’ motivation and comprehension rates. A recent intern survey at Sciences Po shows that the satisfaction rate of students is increasing due to these visionary teaching methods.

To date, approximately 600 hours of courses have been made available online and almost 2000 students have access to it on demand.

Technology

“DeepTagging”: Not just search…Searchable-ITY

Ask yourself, is it easy to find a needle in a haystack? Certainly not, especially if you search for it with just your hands. However, if you were using Alexander Graham Bell’s 1881 invention, the metal detector, finding such a needle should be somewhat easy. The next question is: what if there are several needles in that haystack? Well, our amazing metal detector will ring like if it found a big treasure and we will end up sorting out all the detected needles to find the one we are looking for, which could take quite some time. Of course, we may improve the technology to ensure it gets us a different tone for each kind of metal it finds… but remember, for the job, we need the small iron one, not the large ones…

The point being, whatever searching technology we may develop, the environment we are searching through will most of the time be complex or messy enough so that we end up searching manually. And as scientists claim, entropy (measure of the microscopic disorder of a system) always grows, which in turn makes any search more and more difficult over time. We have all “searched”, “Googled” or “Youtubed” for something… do we find what we are looking for? The answer is yes, however, the search usually takes more of our valuable time than we planned. Fortunately, we don’t need needles every day, and we make sure not to drop them in a hay stack; instead we put them in boxes that we put on shelves, located in rooms, inside buildings, and we glue stickers across the boxes to classify the needles so that we can find the one we need… If we ponder this, it’s not a valid solution either if we have a lot of needles…

How about “Tagging” these objects or pieces of information so that searching technology can find them when they cannot be found natively (picture, for instance, tags attached to a video in YouTube)?

Why not “Tag” them voluntarily to ease the searching process and insure the output will be more relevant to the user (and not get the 471,000 records found by Google for a “bristle brush” search)?

Why not “DeepTag” them - internally - so that the searching process immediately finds the exact piece – within a larger container – we are looking for (such as electronic tags attached to packages within a truck – as opposed to tagging the truck)?

Video, the fastest growing, most challenging searchable media

Corporations, universities, government agencies, services providers, non-profit organizations all are looking at new ways of reducing their products and services’ time to market as a critical competitive advantage, while lowering the cost of their education and communication programs. Thus, boosting stakeholders’ user experience as the potential ultimate key differentiator.

For instance, many of them are now considering blending their usual learning strategy with an informal one. Such an informal learning strategy requires that content be not only appealing but also easy to find and to navigate through. In a more traditional teaching strategy, people are lead throughout the content and cannot really escape the education route. In an informal learning environment, people are on their own and, most of the time, on the job with minimal time to learn more or even to gather the extra knowledge they need to execute their present tasks. To be successful, an informal learning strategy has to implement the right tools to provide its audience with a rich user experience with direct access to the information the audience is looking for at any point in time.

Video is the ideal solution to the first part of the equation, especially while considering the new generation of human resources. As far as the second part of the equation is concerned, industry specialists and analysts all agree it will take years, despite all leaders’ efforts, before one can efficiently search throughout video. Even if they could, the search relevance would remain questionable and require some significant end user involvement in order to sort out the numerous results.

DeepTagging, the solution to make Multi and Rich Media truly searchable

While video’s usage expands, PowerPoint-like products are and will remain the tool of choice to efficiently present any informational, educational or promotional content to the audience. Although video brings a unique value at is carries the speech (explaining the content) on top of the presentation, indexing the overall content based upon the presentation itself – and potentially additional related documents - appears to be the most appropriate technique to automatically and internally tag the overall content, video included.

Whether we consider such a solution just a workaround or a decent long-term solution, DeepTagging still correctly answers our original questions and fulfill our goals of a more targeted, efficient search.

• DeepTagging exposes pieces of information to search engines that wouldn’t otherwise be natively found. Also, that exposure is done automatically. Therefore, it is natively more relevant since some preliminary thoughts have been given to the content of the presentation itself.
• It provides for an internal indexation of the content. In years past, many organizations were limited in their use of video. This was first due to technical limitations, and more recently due to navigational limitations. With Momindum, however, organizations can now produce enormous volumes of video content and still find the relevant information in seconds.
• It helps at providing a more relevant search; not only throughout the examples that we put into the presentation as said earlier, but also through the ability to refurbish content manually if needed for that indexation. For instance, taking out of context all the parallel information we just put into this article (Graham Bell, or even the hay stack!)

DeepTagging, a fruitful innovation

DeepTagging helps at providing the right information at the right time, no matter how rich that content is. The audience saves valuable time, capitalizes on the knowledge made available, improves its skills and performance, and enjoys a brand new experience. All based upon its favorite media: the video.

DeepTagging is at the heart of Momindum’s vision, even predating its inception in 2007. Other vendors adopting the similar strategies reinforce our vision’s accuracy today.

Solutions

New Release: Momindum RichCorder

Build your rich media presentations anytime, anywhere, with as little as your computer and webcam. Our newest software release, Momindum RichCorder, will be available soon to help you deliver rich media presentations faster than ever. . With an automated process, RichCorder will allow you to build enriched presentations inside Microsoft PowerPoint in a few clicks. This new tool will also give you the opportunity to manage all video components of your presentation so you can synchronize your speech and documents instantaneously.

Momindum RichCorder is the perfect companion to Momindum Studio as it automates most of the rich media creation process. The software acts as a simple plug-in of Microsoft PowerPoint. When installed, a new tab appears in the display of Microsoft PowerPoint to give you access to the new functionalities. In addition to synchronizing the slide show with the video/audio, Momindum RichCorder automatically retrieves the content of the PowerPoint presentation to transform it into rich media components:

• The titles of the slides automatically build an outline to the rich media presentation
• The keywords used in the slides or comments (identified by bold, italic characters or specific fonts) automatically tags and indexes the presentation
• The URL links contained in the slides or comments automatically enrich the final presentation with additional and related documents

With Momindum RichCorder’s automatic synchronization, launching, enriching and recording your presentations has never been more efficient. .