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.

Asheville Cloud Computing Day

On August 10th, I will be speaking at an event in Asheville, North Carolina focused on Cloud Computing technology.  If you are interested in learning about how you can use cloud computing in your business or seeing what the City of Asheville is doing with the technology, this event is free and open to the public.  It is a very short mini-conference with a good line-up of speakers and we will also be hearing from Asheville's CIO, Jonathan Feldman.  I hope to see you there!

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City announces speaker lineup for Asheville Cloud Computing Day 2011

ASHEVILLE - The City of Asheville's Information Technology Services Department is sponsoring "Asheville Cloud Computing Day 2011", a mini-conference scheduled for 9 to 11:30 a.m. Aug. 10 in the Municipal Building (100 Court Plaza, 4th floor).

The event seeks to share cutting-edge ideas about cloud computing, a technology that promises to improve city government, as well as other organizations that adopt it.

The agenda and speaker lineup will include:

• “Servers are Software: The Advantages of Cloud Architecture” - Joe Emison, VP, Research & Development, BuildFax.
• “How Citizens Can Use Open Data To Create New City Services” - Trevor Lohrbeer, CEO, Lab Escape.
• “Beyond the server: the rise of cloud-based desktops” - Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, contributing editor, CBS News and ZDNet.
• “The Playground of Today’s Tech Innovators: How Cloud Computing Changes The Game” - Troy Tolle, CTO, Digital Chalk.

RSVPs from members of the community interested in attending the event are appreciated, but not necessary. RSVPs or questions about the event may be directed to @avlcio on Twitter, or jfeldman@ashevillenc.gov.

For information about Asheville's Information Technology Services program, visit http://ashevillenc.gov/its.

Save Time with Custom Search in Chrome & Firefox

I am a fan of anything that can simplify and quickly make my life easier, no matter how small that thing might be.  This week one of our talented developers (@devewm) at DigitalChalk showed me something that will save me several minutes every single day.  He introduced me to making your own custom searches in Chrome and Firefox.  I wanted to share with you how it really simplified my day in hopes that you could apply it as well.
At DigitalChalk, we use Edgewall's Trac to for our development wiki and issue tracking system.  Every single day, I will be talking with someone in sales, support, development or operations and will inevitably get asked to go and view a certain ticket by its ticket number. While it is simple to use the search field within Trac itself, it would be nice to just navigate straight to the ticket from the browser.  This is where a custom search shined for me.  You can take any known url and insert your search text right from the browser bar.  I used this to setup a custom DigitalChalk Trac search that would take me straight to the ticket I was looking for saving me a click everytime.
Here is how you can set it up for yourself in Chrome:

Open Chrome Preferences

Click on the Manage Button next to the Search drop-down

In the Search Engines dialog, click on the + button in the bottom left hand corner.  The important things here are the keyword and the URL.  You will notice that I am using a keyword of "!trac".  This is what I will type in the browser bar and it will take whatever text I put next and place it in the URL where I have specified "%s".  In the case above, the "%s" is at the end of the URL and will correspond to the ticket number I would like to display.

After that, you are ready to use it.  Just open up a new tab and type in your keyword.

Chrome will resolve the keyword to your Search and then you can type in your search term. After you press enter, you will be taken directly to the page that you were targeting.

On Firefox, the same feature exist, but it is buried a little differently.  You can accomplish what you want to do with Bookmarks.

Under the "Bookmarks" menu item, go to "Show All Bookmarks"

In the Bookmarks dialog, right-click on the "Bookmarks Menu" and choose "New Folder..." (You don't have to do this step, but it is easier to keep track of your custom searches this way). I names my folder "Search Helpers".

Right-click on the folder you just created and choose "New Bookmark..."

You can fill out the form exactly as you did in Chrome

Use it the exact same way.  Firefox will not autocomplete the keyword to your Search name, but it functions the same way.

I hope you can put this tip to good use and that it saves you some clicks along the way.

DigitalChalk with HDLearn Technology

Today marks another release of DigitalChalk with an exciting update to our video capabilities.  We have launched DigitalChalk with HDLearn® Technology today allowing you to encode and deliver your videos in extremely high quality.  I first announced this capability when I spoke at the international cloud computing conference (ICICT 2010) in Cairo, Egypt last month and it was received with a great response.  If you were not able to see it at that time, I am sure that you will enjoy seeing it now.  We have completely changed the encoding and streaming capabilities of our site with this release, taking all of the worry about what do when building your courses away.  You will no longer have to choose what profiles you want to deliver to your students.  Now, when you upload a video to DigitalChalk, we automatically encode it into several different profiles without you having to choose.  We also have added technology to ensure the best delivery possible to your students.  We are now able to detect the speed of your students connection and make choices in real-time on what the best quality video is that they can consume regardless of their bandwidth.  With our new Pro+ and Business+ packages, your upload limit has increased to 1GB and it includes a encoding profile that is HD 720p.  DigitalChalk is the first on-demand training platform on the web that will allow you to deliver true 720p video to your students, and we are thrilled to see how you use it!

Alerts for EC2 through CloudWatch

Monitoring your applications running on Amazon's EC2 platform just got easier. Today, Amazon announced the public availability of CloudWatch for EC2 with Alarms. Instead of having to poll and ask CloudWatch for the current status, you can actually have that information pushed to you instead. This is a much more efficient way to monitor you applications running in the Amazon cloud. Right now the only new alarm that is supported is for Amazon SNS, but this is a huge step forward. Before today, CloudWatch could still trigger an Auto Scaling policy, but with the addition of SNS the doors are really opening up. Using Amazon SNS, you can do almost any type of notification that you would like posting to HTTP/HTTPS, Email, JSON, or directly into SQS. This makes the service very flexible. You are able to monitor CPU Utilization, Average Disk Reads, Average Disk Writes and Network traffic in and out.
Amazon has also enabled a new monitoring tab in the EC2 management console that will allow you to look at the graphs for these elements on each of your EC2 instances. The data only goes back to the 2nd of December since it was just released today, but this will be extremely useful for a quick read on how your instances are performing.

Amazon is certainly hitting things on my wishlist this year. Now if they would only enable CloudWatch and Alarms for metrics on SQS!  Hopefully this is just around the corner. You can read more about the new features and the pricing of CloudWatch on EC2 here.