Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas

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     "author": "Troy",
     "content": "Merry Christmas! Remember the reason for the season. \u003ca href=\"http://bible.us/116/luk.2.1-20.nlt\"\u003eLuke 2\u003c/a\u003e"
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Happy 4th of July

Independence Day is one of my favorite holidays. I can't help but smile and fill with pride when I see the red white and blue of the flag go up in store windows, street corners, and on the front porches of so many homes. It is a feeling of strength, of pride, of gratitude and humility all neatly wrapped into one. It is a feeling that warms the heart and the soul.  It is hamburgers and hotdogs, fireworks and swimming pools, parades and homemade apple pie and ice cream.  I am so grateful to live in this country and have the freedoms that we enjoy. I have such respect for every man and woman that has served in our armed forces and in the agencies that protect our freedoms.  Everything that we enjoy is owed to the brave men and women who have fought and stood with unfailing courage against the enemies of the freedom we so cherish, many giving their own lives to protect the way we get to live. Thank you to my father and uncle for their valiant service in Vietnam and after. Thank you to my brother-in-law for his service in Iraq.  A huge thank you to all of you who have served - past and present heros. As I enjoy my traditional 4th of July pancake breakfast and family barbecue with fireworks, I will do so with smiles and laughter mingling in the air, pride in my heart and a lump in my throat - enjoying my family and the celebration and remembering the sacrifices that were made for what is truly special and uniquely American.  Happy 4th of July!

Video Based Learning Now Available on the iPad

Mobile devices and mobile connectivity are such hot topics right now, so it is natural that enabling learning on these devices is a big subject as well.  As I started research on what it would take to bring e-learning to mobile devices 2 years ago, the predictions were staggering - even back then. In the short time span from that point until now, the numbers continue to grow rapidly upwards on the number of devices, users, and the amount of bandwidth consumed on mobile platforms.  It was certainly evident then that we had to address this demand and deliver DigitalChalk on tablet devices.

As simple as that might sound on the surface, it took a lot of careful thought and planning because we did not want to offer our customers any less of an experience on their iPad or tablet than we did on their laptops.  One of the strengths of DigitalChalk is our ability to track the student's activity to a very detailed level.  To meet the strictest requirement in the continuing education space, we had to maintain the ability to do that tracking, as well as prevent the student from fast forwarding through the course if the instructor had configured the course in that manner.  (Some accrediting bodies require students to meet or exceed a specific amount of time in a course.)  Simply enabling an HTML5 based delivery of our video and audio lessons was  simply not enough.  We started over a year ago converting our encoding and streaming infrastructures and the content our customers were pushing into the system to facilitate this move.  Terabytes of video and audio were reprocessed and packaged and hundreds of CPU hours were consumed in preparation for extending full functionality to iPads and tablets.

I am certainly interested in hearing ideas from our customers on what enhancements that would like to see in the future.  We are working on a couple of things to be released very soon that I think you will all enjoy and were direct requests from some of our customers.

DigitalChalk Rolls Out Enterprise e-Learning and Discounts

Online training leader DigitalChalk introduces Enterprise features and shopping cart discount options in their latest release.

With over 2,000 client organizations and nearly 6,000 courses being offered, DigitalChalk has become the clear leader in Cloud-based e-learning

Asheville, NC (PRWEB) December 19, 2011

Online training software leader, DigitalChalk announced today it's release of the winter 2012 "Newton" edition to it's Cloud-based training software as a service (SaaS) platform. This latest release includes features for both the professional trainers selling courses online as well as the Enterprise accounts. Current Professional and Business account customers have full access to the shopping cart discount features. Enterprise accounts now have an advanced rules engine for course registration.

The discount features introduced for Professional and Business accounts include options for course providers to offer coupon codes, combination course bundles and even advanced user matching options. Matching options only allow discounts to apply if the user meets criteria such as an email domain or geographic location match. Training providers can also create registration codes for bulk sales to business clients.

With the introduction of Enterprise accounts, DigitalChalk now provides advanced course delivery, tracking and reporting features along with full single sign-on capabilities to integrate the Cloud-based training services into corporate networks. This release includes an advanced course registration rules engine that allows training managers to set up rules to assign training courses to audiences based on geography, user rules, user profile data or keyword matching.

"The Enterprise edition released this year has had significant traction for both current clients and new customers who need to rapidly roll out online courses" said Tony McCune, VP Sales. "Clients now routinely sign up, publish courses and deliver training to thousands or more employees in less than a month. With over 2,000 client organizations and nearly 6,000 courses being offered, DigitalChalk has become the clear leader in Cloud-based e-learning," said McCune.

About DigitalChalk
DigitalChalk was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Asheville, NC. The SaaS training platform is available on a per-delivery fee basis for training professionals selling courses or a per-user basis for Business and Enterprise accounts. DigitalChalk is a full-service e-learning platform with course authoring, delivery and reporting included. DigitalChalk is the first and only online platform to provide HDLearn technology for video streaming capabilities that include tracking, progress control and reporting in a video lesson.

DigitalChalk is a Gazelle

It really has been a whirlwind of a morning. I woke up this morning and walked out the door to get a morning cup of coffee at the local Starbucks before heading into work.  I grabbed the Wall Street Journal and started reading. That is when it really sank in.  I was reading an article about my company DigitalChalk.com in the Wall Street Journal!  This will be one of those days that you always remember when you look back at all of the things that happen as you start a company.  It is certainly a highlight for me.  This picture is one that I took sitting there near the fire reading the paper and enjoying my coffee.
I was interviewed by Mark Whitehouse about 2 weeks ago while I was walking down the street in San Francisco, a long ways from our headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina but right in the heart of tech startup country.  He told me he was trying to do some research on why it was hard for startups right now to get adequate funding. I was excited to share with him about DigitalChalk and the success that we have been blessed with in some really hard economic times.  Our growth this year has been better than it ever has and there is really no end in sight!  As I described this to Mark, he told me over and over that we had all the markings of a great story as a Gazelle.  I really like that analogy.  Gazelles are extremely fast and nimble animals and if you had the opportunity to meet the team at DigitalChalk, I think it describes us completely.  I get to work with some of the smartest people with the agility to change and go from 0 to 100 at anytime.
Reading through the article, and seeing some of the accomplishments in print in the Wall Street Journal is both exciting and humbling, but most of all, it makes me thankful for the passion and the dedication to all the people who make up the DigitalChalk team.  This is something we can all look back on and be proud of.
Please check out the article: Shortage of Capital Costs Firm

DigitalChalk at ASTD

DigitalChalk is going to be giving away $300 over Twitter at the ASTD 2009 Conference in Washington DC this year.  If you are at the conference and have a Twitter account, you can play.  Watch crazy man Josh in this video...



I heard that they were at the White House yesterday and President Obama asked how he could play, but they sadly had to turn him down since he isn't going to be present at the conference.  Oh well, maybe next time.

The goal of the game will be to figure out a word or phrase that will be on the back of a bunch of shirts running around the conference.  If you want to be a live participant in the game, go see Josh and Tony at booth 1519 and make sure that you follow DigitalChalk's Twitter account http://twitter.com/digitalchalk .  More information is available on Tony's blog.

In the Works at DigitalChalk

There are a lot of exciting things happening at DigitalChalk right now.  The development, operations, and quality teams are very hard at work on a new release of the product coming very soon.  Code named "Einstein", this release is packed full of feature requests from our customers.  While we wrap up the open tickets and complete QA, I thought I would start giving a sneak peak at some of the features that are going to be included by writing about them here in my blog over the next couple of weeks.

We have done a lot of work on the interface of DigitalChalk in the Einstein release.  Immediately you will notice that we have changed the look to be much more streamlined.

We had a couple of goals in moving this direction.  First of all, we really wanted to be able to provide much more information on a single page to the instructor or student.  This is really a challenge because we needed to balance between a page that feels cluttered and has too much information and keeping it "too clean" where the information cannot be found on the same page without navigating away.  It is also important to us that Einstein is compatible with a wide range of browsers.  Those of you that have done any development at all on the web know what a pain that can be.  Something that works in Internet Explorer will not work in Safari, and something that works in Firefox will not work in Internet Explorer and that isn't even taking into account all of the different versions of the browsers.  Sometimes this feels like a loosing battle for a complicated site.  Page rendering time has also been an area that we have devoted significant resources toward.  We are seeing an improvement now of over 500% on some pages!  I will be including more screenshots in the future of various parts of the site as I talk about specific changes.  We are all very excited about the changes and can't wait to push them out to you.

OAuth and Twitter

 Earlier last month, Twitter released OAuth access to their site and to the API.  Excited about the possibility of integrating some DigitalChalk functions with Twitter, I decided to take a couple of hours to play around with it and see what it offered.  There are lots of examples on the Twitter API site, but none of them are in Java.  What?  Really?  Maybe because it is so easy to do, but I do think that it is worth posting about.  First, a little about the flow of getting your access credentials from Twitter.  The diagram below shows the order of events and some pieces of the data that you need to get started.

For my implementation example I am using a Java OAuth library written by John Kristian, Praveen Alavilli and Dirk Balfanz.

1. You must get your Consumer Key and Consumer Secret by registering your application on Twitter.com

2. The goal is to get an Access Token and Secret that you can use to read and/or write to a Twitter users information without having to ask for their username and password everytime.  We also don't want to have to store that information because they may change it on Twitter.com and we don't want to have to synchronize the information. (The user doesn't really want to give that information to us anyway)
   
3. The first step is get request a Request Token from Twitter.  You do this by using a timestamp, nonce, oauth version, and your consumer key and signing it with your consumer secret.  Then a request can be made to http://twitter.com/oauth/request_token including the signature.
   

public TwitterTokenPair getRequestToken(TwitterConsumerCredentials credentials) throws TwitterOAuthException {
   TwitterTokenPair result = null;
   OAuthAccessor accessor = newAccessor(credentials);
   OAuthClient client = new OAuthClient(new HttpClient3());
   try {
      client.getRequestToken(accessor);
      // Build the token pair to return
      result = new TwitterTokenPair();
      result.setToken(accessor.requestToken);
      result.setTokenSecret(accessor.tokenSecret);
   } catch (Throwable t) {
      throw new TwitterOAuthException(t);
   }   return result;}

4. Twitter will generate a Request Token and Token Secret and send them back
5. Save the Request Token and Token Secret off for later use.  We will use them again after the user has granted us access.
6. Build up a the URL for a user to access, sending them to Twitter, to grant us access.  This will be done by sending them to http://twitter.com/oauth/authorize?oauth_token=.  You can optionally add a callback URL on the parameters or just rely on the one that you entered on the Twitter site when registering your application.

public String getAuthorizeUrl(String token, String callbackUrl, Map callbackParameters) {
   Map parameters = new HashMap();
   parameters.put("oauth_token", token);
   if (null != callbackUrl) {
      parameters.put("oauth_callback", callbackUrl + "?" + asQueryString(callbackParameters));
   }
   return authorizeUrl + "?" + asQueryString(parameters);
}


7. If you user grants you access, then your callback URL will be called.
8. Upon recieving the callback, you now need to request and Access Token from Twitter.  This is very similar to step 3 except you will be using a different URL and the Request Token and Secret that you saved off in step 4.  You will sign your request with your consumer secret and the token secret and send the request for the Access Token to http://twitter.com/oauth/access_token.

public TwitterTokenPair getAccessToken(TwitterConsumerCredentials credentials, TwitterTokenPair requestTokenPair) throws TwitterOAuthException {
   TwitterTokenPair result = null;
   OAuthAccessor accessor = newAccessor(credentials);
   accessor.requestToken = requestTokenPair.getToken();
   accessor.tokenSecret = requestTokenPair.getTokenSecret();
   OAuthClient client = new OAuthClient(new HttpClient3());
   try {
      client.getAccessToken(accessor, HttpClient.GET, null);
      // Build the token pair to return
      result = new TwitterTokenPair();
      result.setToken(accessor.accessToken);
      result.setTokenSecret(accessor.tokenSecret);
   } catch (Throwable t) {
      throw new TwitterOAuthException(t);
   }
   result;
}

9. Twitter will generate an Access Token and Token Secret and send them back.  At this point, the Application is added to the users Connections tab.

10. Once you parse the Access Token and Token Secret out of the response, you can use them from that point forward to make Twitter API calls on behalf of the user that granted access.

That is it!  Now you have successfully acquired the Access tokens and can perform the Twitter REST API services for that user.  Because I have granted DigitalChalk the to update my status, the application can do so at its hearts content.

TwitterHttpCommand twitterCommand = new TwitterHttpCommand(credentials);
try {
   Map parameters = new HashMap();
   parameters.put("status", "Just finished OAuth integration implementation of Twitter and DigitalChalk in Java!  Woohoo!");
   response = service.execute(twitterCommand, HttpMethod.POST, accessTokens, "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml", parameters);
   printInputStream(response.getResponse());
} catch (TwitterOAuthException ex) {
   System.out.println(ex);
} catch (IOException ioex) {
   System.out.println(ioex);
}

UPDATE: I have been asked to include the code for this experiment.  You will need to download the Java OAuth Library and include it in the classpath as well as enter your Consumer Key and Secret into the twitter.properties file.  The Test.java class should walk you through how I used it to test access to Twitter.  Let me know what you think and if you would like to see anything else added.  You can download the code here: http://bit.ly/Pz55C

Trip to Google

We had an absolute blast on the trip to the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. Last week I had the pleasure of traveling out to Google's headquarters with the winning team of the Juicy Ideas Competition.  Ryan Klinger, Spencer Price, Andrew Drake and Justin Henry from Appalachain State University won the competition in the Western North Carolina region and at the national level.  The team was able to take a tour of Google headquarters, get shuffled around in a limo, and present their winning idea at a Google TechTalk.  The weekend was absolutely amazing and lots of thank yous and props go to Mary Radomile, Susie Vaks and Matt Dunne of Google, Pam Lewis of AdvantageWest and Dale Carroll, now with the State of North Carolina as Deputy Secretary.
I am happy to say that the we also had a couple of meetings that were focused on the development of next years competition.  I am excited that we have started the process again and I know it will be just as fun next year.  Get ready, because it is going to be bigger and include many more schools nationwide.  So, if you think you have the next Juicy Idea that will change the way that we live and do business, watch for the announcement of the competition at your local college campus.
Because DigitalChalk was working on the technology behind the competition and putting that on Google's AppEngine platform, it was especially interesting to get to speak with Pete Koomen, one of two product managers working on the platform.  We were able to discuss what the experience was with the platform this year and what will make it even better next year.  At one point, during the registration for the competition, we were experiencing 25 hits/second on the AppEngine site for the competition and the platform handled it with grace.  Pete was able to share some of the experiences that they have had in the past year on the platform and some of what is coming in the future.  We had a great discussion on the future of cloud computing and what might be some ways to help make a common platform across the different cloud providers.  I will be looking at implementing some of what we talked about and releasing it to the open source community if I am successful.  Needless to say, I am very excited about the competition next year and I can't wait to see what new ideas we see!

I got an "A" at Appalachian State University

Last week, I had the privilege of driving up to Appalachian State University to announce the winner of the national Juicy Ideas Competition.  We really had a fun time with this and made it a good surprise for the winning team.  DigitalChalk sponsored the contest along with AdvantageWest and Google.  This is how it happened...  Pam Lewis, Dale Carroll and Scott Hamilton from AdvantageWest and myself, representing DigitalChalk, met with Chancellor Ken Peacock of ASU before the students arrived at the Chancellors office.  The students were told that they were being presented with their regional winning prizes, a sweatshirt and video camera from Google because they won the Western North Carolina region.  When the students arrived at Chancellor Peacocks office, the prizes where handed out and pictures were taken.  After about 15 minutes, the Chancellor was told that he had a phone call and everyone was asked to move to the board room across the hall.  In the board room, I had a video chat, using Google video chat, started with Mary Radomile, a program manager at Google.  She was able to address the students and congratulate them on their success at the regional level.  Then, she proceeded to tell them that they had also won the national competition.  It was great!  I will be accompanying the students on a trip to Google headquarters in Feburary and will be discussing the details for the competition next year.  We hope to make it bigger and better.  Congratulations to Ryan Klinger, Andrew Drake, Spencer Price, and Justin Henry the Juicy Ideas Competition national champions.  You can read this press release on the competition.

Oh yea, how I got an "A"...  When we were posing for pictures, I had worn my black shirt for the occasion, but I didn't have any gold on.  Chancellor Peacock gave me the Appalachian State University pin right off of his coat.  I wore it with pride.  Thank you Chancellor Peacock!

EC2 News More Than Expected

Wow, I was not expecting all of the announcements that happened today. I knew that EC2 was coming out of beta, that has been talked about for some time now, and we all knew that EC2 Windows boxes would be available this Fall, but I can't say that I was expecting the other news. It is exciting though for companies like DigitalChalk that rely on excellent services around cloud computing.

You can see everything that was announced today on the Amazon Web Services Blog. While I am excited about EC2 being out of beta and playing around with the new Windows instances starting at 12.5 cents per hour, the other news is even more interesting.

• Amazon released an SLA for EC2
• Amazon plans to release an AWS management console
• Amazon is planning to release load balancing, auto scaling and cloud monitoring services

That is a lot of WOW factor for one day. I am particularly interested in seeing what is possible with the management console and the load balancing, scaling and monitoring tools. This could be as simple as EC2 images preconfigured with HAProxy, Hyperic and other tools, or it could go as far as what RightScale offers with their tools.

There is much to look forward to!

Carolina Connect 2008

This year, the Carolina Connect conference will be held at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville and if you an entrepreneur in Western North Carolina, you should attend.  Carolina Connect is the premier conference for fostering entrepreneurial growth of businesses of all sizes and stages in WNC.  I am excited to let you know that DigitalChalk will be there in several ways.  We will be participating in the sales and technology converstation tables of the conference.  I will also be talking some about the Creative Juice Competition and we will be annoucing the secret item there!  There was a story on Carolina Connect released by the Asheville Hub today that actually featured Infinity Learning Solutions.  You can read the article in the press release.  The champion behind the conference is Pam Lewis at Avantage West and she has also written a description of the conference posted at SwampFox.  The conference will be informative and worth your while to attend for such a steal of a registration fee of only $50.00.  I hope to see you there!  Come say hello to me when you get there.

Amazon Web Services adds Elastic Block Store

We have known about it for months, but very few have been able to play with it until now. Several months ago Amazon started talking about "Persistant Storage" becoming available on their platform and today it is available to everyone. It is labeled as Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS). At DigitalChalk we have been looking forward to this for several reasons. The most immediate benefit that I see getting from this is the ability to have a block of storage that we can put the data store on for our databases. Right now we have very frequent and bandwidth intensive backup solutions in place that snapshot our data and put it into S3. With ESB we will be able to allocate a block of storage up to a TB in size and then simply attach that to any running EC2 instance, essentially making it a SAN in the clouds. Amazon states that "each storage volume is automatically replicated within the same availability zone" helping with the backup scenerios and reliability of data. It doesn't seem to have it across data centers, but this is at least going to help prevent failure due to a single piece of hardware. They have also included the ability to create a "point-in-time snapshot of volumes" which will be extremely useful for the movement of data and quickly standing up a duplicate instance for testing of any sort. This is also going to be helpful as we continue to consult and help companies move their infrastructure to the clouds. We are finding that many we help have a hard time mentally moving from the physical box where they can just add hard drive capacity and rely on a file system. This will allow us to gradually and easily move their applications "as is" to the clouds without having to introduce S3 from the start for reliable storage. I am looking forward to using this service to improve our process at DigitalChalk. The next on the list to come out of the private beta is SimpleDB for me. We have already architected some solutions for SimpleDB and and just itching for its release.

Creative Juice Competition

I know, shame on me. I haven't posted anything for a month now. But today, I do have something worth writing about. I have been busy in the ether of cloud computing this past month. Obviously working on DigitalChalk which resides on the AWS cloud but I have also been working many long nights with Google's AppEngine and have released a site today which runs almost exclsively on it. The site can be found at http://www.creativejuicecompetition.com . Creative Juice is a competition that DigitalChalk is helping sponsor that challenges students to create "value" out of a throw-away object. The contest is designed to help foster imagination, creativity, team work and entreprenuership skills. There are 5 regions across the US competing and the throw away object for each region is secret and will be revealed on the launch date for the region. I am excited about seeing what these students can come up with as value. We are still furiously working out some final details and prizes which I will soon be blogging about. Trust me, there are some really really cool prizes we are working on!

Moodle and DigitalChalk

As you can imagine, being an online delivery and publishing site for training through video and audio, we do a good bit of work for educational institutions.  This week we have announced that we are now providing single signon between Moodle and DigitalChalk as well as Moodle hosting.  Moodle is a widely used system for Course Management and creating online learning communities.  It seemed very natural for us to use our expertise in cloud computing, SaaS and education to create an offering that would allow for dynamic multimedia lessons to be delivered within the education community.

DigitalChalk on Cloud Computing Podcast

It is always fun to hear a someone in a "sales" role talk technical.  There are always a couple of fun laughs to be had by all, but I have to hand it to our VP of sales, Tony McCune as he did a good job today on a podcast in which he was on the hotseat.
Tony was interviewed today by John Willis in his Cloud Computing podcast.  It isn't extremely technical, but it does explain some of how we are using Amazon Web Services to accomplish the architecture that we have for the DigitalChalk products.  It was great to listen in on and I have to give great props to Tony for doing a good job explaining some of the technologies we are using.  Check it out for yourself at http://www.johnmwillis.com/cloud-computing/cloud-cafe-podcast-7/ .  On a side note, John Willis has since signed up as an instructor and you will be able to take his courses soon!  As soon as he gets the first ones posted I will let you know.

IBM and DigitalChalk work to make training more accessible

Earlier this week, DigitalChalk, IBM and Hunter College announced that we are working together to make video based training more accessible for the hearing impaired. Looking ahead to our Fall Release is very exciting because of this ability. Instructors will have the ability to send the videos off for transcription and automatically include the result as Closed Captioning with the click of a button. Instead of having to mail off videos for a text transcript and then manually typing it into the system, this will be taken care of by DigitalChalk. We want to continually move forward with the goal of providing a product that is accessible to everyone.

Sun and Amazon... Could Be

I have always wanted to attend JavaOne having been a Java developer and architect now for more than 12 years and after seeing the hints that are flying around what might be announced tomorrow at the dinner before the conference makes me want to be there even more. Looks like Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz is going to make some interesting news for the blogosphere. David Berlind is attending Startup Camp for the conference and has talked about what might be happening in his blog David Berlind's Tech Radar. He says that Schwartz hinted at an Amazon with ZFS announcement for tomorrow night. This would be a great addition in many ways for the Amazon Cloud.
As it stand right now, Amazon is running an Intel based platform. I will be interested to see if the announcement involves offering some Solaris Operating System AMIs or even taking the open source codebase for ZFS and offering some of the same features on the Amazon EC2 infrastructure. This last option would be somewhat challenging without Sun's help but they have stated on their Solaris 10 Knowledge Base for ZFS site that they are looking at porting ZFS to linux. With ZFS on Amazon, we could really some amazing performance gains, virtually unlimited scalability on the file system, and much more reliable data integrity. We have had no problems with any of these so far (knock on wood) but having that extra assurance would always be welcome.
Om Malik interviewed Schwartz and asked about the availability of Amazon and Cloud Computing helping startups and what Jonathan's take was. He replied: “Do you think it would make sense for us to partner with Amazon to offer free info on the cloud? ... Then you’ll be paying attention to the announcement we make tomorrow with what we’ll be doing with Amazon.”
All of this build-up, let's see what happens! I will be very interested in seeing how this will impact Amazon EC2 and of course DigitalChalk!

AB Tech and Heath Shuler

Today was a big day for Asheville Buncombe Technical Community College (AB Tech) and the Small Business Center that is on their campus. Our US Congressman for the 11th District in North Carolina, Heath Shuler, came to present a check for $354,240.00 to Russ Yelton and Dr. Betty Young. This money was given to be used to help deliver and innovate clean energy technologies and also to help educate people around the globe. Representative Shuler talked about the importance of the beautiful environment that we live in and our natural resources that we have. He encourages the growth of "Green" technologies coming out of the Small Business Center and Western North Carolina. We are excited that DigitalChalk software will be providing the educational arm of this grant by delivering lessons, lectures and discussons on the clean energy initiatives.

Congressman Heath Shuler

Heath Shuler, Russ Yelton, Dr. Betty Young

Russ Yelton... Lights, Camera, ACTION