Quality of leadership can make the difference between a successful and a failed company. Investing in building effective leaders and leadership practices is a must for any organization to prosper

Time and again, we have seen Flash being extended in unique ways by leveraging the power of AS3. We caught something in the feeds yesterday that truly took us by surprise – face recognition using Flash. Check out the video here.

There’s more talk about Digital natives going around; Jeremiah Owyang blogged from the Corporate Social Networking Conference in Amsterdam. Time and again, this talk about Digital natives and the millenials comes up, and there still isn’t much agreement about the key issues at hand.

Summer time in India is family vacation time. While we’ve stopped fleeing abroad, we tend to travel farther from home just to experience what India has to offer. This time, for a change, we decided to explore more of our local coastline. The state we live in Maharashtra has a vast coastline known for its ruggedness, beaches and spectacular natural beauty. It’s known as the Konkan and while we’ve lived just a hundred miles from it and have visited on and off; we never found the time to feel its rhythms.

There’s been quite a bit written about how Twitter can be used for learning. A few interesting reads are listed at the end of this post.

Tony Karrer’s post guided me to this article in CLO magazine by Jay Cross and Clark Quinn, in which they urge CLOs to become Chief Meta-Learning Officers.

Reached the Learning Circuits’ recent survey of LMS user organizations (184 responses), via Tom Werner. Some interesting findings there about the reasons for LMS implementations, most valuable features and key challenges in implementation

When your clients appreciate your work, it does feel good. I was pleasantly surprised to discover this example of client appreciation while browsing the web today…

The New York Times recently launched version 2.0 of their Times Reader for Windows, Mac, and Linux, developed using Adobe’s AIR and Flex. This is available for download from the NY Times’ Time Reader 2.0 site or Adobe’s Marketplace.

I have always believed that the present economic slowdown would positively benefit the eLearning industry in the long run. There have been several recent surveys to suggest the same (two of them are mentioned in the latter half of this post) and now, a ValueNotes report released in May 2009 specifically examines the status of the Indian eLearning outsourcing industry and predicts a high rate of growth until 2012, despite the current recession.

We discovered ‘The Ten Commandments of eLearning” as elucidated by Cath Ellis and Clive Shepherd. We’ve decided to follow in the same vein and list our commandments. First off, we thought ten is too many to remember, so we cut it down to five. There are some similarities to Cath and Clive’s commandments but that is to be expected given the nature of this post.

The world economy undergoes cycles of upswings and downturns, of varying intensities and durations. During slowdowns or recessions, most organizations look for ways to cut costs. Learning and Development (L&D) budgets are often among the first to experience cuts, as organizations tend to focus on ‘core’ production areas. But while such cuts may bring short-term economic benefits, what is their long-term impact?