Yesterday Google released a visual search engine called Google Goggles. It is available right now as an application for Android 1.6+ (i.e. Donut or Eclair) based mobile devices. It uses several sophisticated image recognition techniques like object recognition, OCR, face matching, etc.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve met some prospective customers from the Telecom domain here in India. While they’re all keyed about mobile learning, they have serious reservations about how they (as telecom service providers) can leverage their own networks. I often point to some simple facts. Each of their employees carries a cell phone and is connected to the network 24 hours a day. These employees are scattered all over the Indian geography. This presents a unique challenge and opportunity.

Our innovation team spends a fair bit of time trawling the web looking for interesting stuff that’s related to learning and technology that might impact learning in general. Typically, we come up with a list that’s shared with across Upside Learning.

A study conducted by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth on the Inc 500 (a list of fastest growing companies in US) reveals interesting trends on usage of Social Media. The 148 companies who responded were asked the same detailed questions concerning their usage and measurement of social media that were asked of the Inc. 500 approximately one year and two years earlier. Questions probed the familiarity of respondents with six prominent social media (blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, message boards and wikis). In order to maintain the integrity of all comparisons, all those tools studied in the first two studies were included in this followup research. In 2009, several new tools were added including the popular microblogging service Twitter and other popular social networking sites like Linkedin, Facebook, and MySpace.

Dr. Bhaskar Chatterjee, the chief guest at the CLO Summit India earlier this month, spoke that mistakes should be part of a learning organization’s culture. That resonated strongly with me. I have written about how we all learn more from mistakes.  At Upside Learning do ask all our employees to not be afraid of making mistakes.

Upside Learning sponsored the inaugural CLO Summit India at the end of last week. My partner Amit Gautam and I attended the summit and came back satisfied with the level of participation seen at this inaugural summit. Overall we felt it was a great inaugural event that pulled in some respected names to speak. There were some equally respected names in the audience too. We feel the CLO Summit has the potential to grow into a premier HR event in India focused around L&D. If the organizers can build a community around this , it will be even more wonderful. We of course, are happy to have assisted the first edition in our little way.

Mobile Learning has finally come of age. It’s been on the horizon for many years, but now with bandwidth available for mobiles & the devices themselves are becoming more capable to start competing with computers in processing capabilities, it’s finally here! We believe mobile learning has the potential to truly become anywhere, anytime, for anyone learning. My colleague Abhijit Kadle has written about the myths of mobile learning earlier and also posted a great list of top 50 mobile learning resources. We have worked on some projects for our clients to create small learning modules delivered to mobile devices and game-like quizzes. These are exciting times for mLearning.

Trawling through my feeds earlier this weeks I came across this link-up post by Ricard Nantel over at the Workplace Learning Blog pointing to a blog post on Harvard Business Publishing about six social media trends.
Worth a quick recount:

Upside Learning is happy to be associated with the inaugural CLO Summit India.

I’ve spent an inordinately long time writing a whitepaper on mobile learning trying to expound our thoughts about it and how it might be used in the workplace. I’ve been doing some research around it and I’ve documented some of the better links I’ve come across. Again, as with the links I posted about Games and Simulation, these aren’t categorized in any way nor does the order assume any significance.

Yes, we believe it can.

Having fun is an experience that stays with you longer than any form of instruction. We advocate inclusion of games & fun interactions to achieve long term learning, and change of behaviors. Learning Games that pull learners to have fun (and learn while they have fun).

This video below from the fun theory , an initiative of Volkswagen, shows just how fun could be effective in getting people to consider changing their habits

Let’s use more fun activities in our learning courses as well.

Earlier this month I blogged about why Training companies are adopting eLearning. There are reasons other than their clients demanding it. Reflecting on my interactions with Training Providers over the last couple of quarters, I’ve made a list of the top 8 reasons for them to adopt eLearning