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In the last four decades, economic and technological forces have transformed the U.S. economy from a production-based economy to a service based economy. The new economy puts a premium on intellectual capital and Life-long learning has become an imperative.

E-learning as a Weapon
Today’s workforce has to process more information in a shorter amount of time. New products and services are emerging with accelerating speed. As production cycles and life spans of products continue to shorten, information and training quickly become obsolete. Training managers feel the urgency to deliver knowledge and skills more rapidly and efficiently whenever and wherever needed. In the age of just-in-time production, just-in-time training becomes a critical element to organizational success.

Corporations now view learning increasingly as a competitive weapon rather than an annoying cost factor. Business success depends more and more on high-quality employee performance, which in turn requires high-quality training. Corporate executives are beginning to understand that enhancing employee skills is key to creating a sustainable competitive advantage.

E-learning To the Rescue
But for global organizations, live classroom-based training is becoming too costly and cumbersome. Even if employees had the time to attend all the courses and seminars and to read all the books and reports they should to remain up-to-date in their area of work, the cost of such learning would be prohibitive. The need to transform how organizations learn points to a more modern, efficient, and flexible alternative: e-learning. The mission of corporate e-learning is to supply the workforce with an up-to-date and cost-effective program that yields motivated, skilled, and loyal knowledge workers.

The growth of the World Wide Web, high-capacity corporate networks, and high-speed desktop computers has made e-learning available to people 24 hours a day, seven days a week around the globe. This enables businesses to distribute training and critical information to multiple locations easily and conveniently. Employees can then access training when it is convenient for them, at home or in the office.

Virtual collaboration between participants is the most important element of successful implementation of online education. The true power of the Web lies in its ability to create collaborative learning communities that introduce real-time human interaction.

Electronic learning solutions offer more collaboration and interaction with experts and peers as well as a higher success rate than the live alternative. Teaching and communication techniques create an interactive online environment include case studies, story-telling, simulations, streamed videos, online references, personalized coaching and mentoring, discussion groups, project teams, chat rooms, e-mail, bulletin boards, tips, tutorials, FAQs, and wizards.

In Conclusion……..
Increasing global competition, rapid technological advances, demographic changes, and the emergence of a service- and knowledge based economy force organizations to train and re-train their workforce in new ways. Companies that deploy and effectively utilize e-learning will have a distinct competitive advantage.

The Internet presents companies with numerous possibilities for leveraging knowledge and education resources. It redefines e-learning not only in terms of better delivery, but also more current, dynamic educational content, more personalized, relevant learning experiences, and more collaboration with experts and peers.

About Author:
Sam Arora is a Search Marketing Specialist at BlueApple, a Web Development Company with a well connected development infrastructure in India having a strong portfolio of global clients offering superior, web design services and web application, Elearning software development solutions at competitive costs.

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Take a look at some of the exciting web trends to look forward to in 2011 including the breakthrough of HTML5, CSS3 and other concepts!

HTML5 and CSS3
You can’t talk about website design trends for 2011 without mentioning HTML5 and CSS3. Both HTML5 and CSS3 make websites easier to build and link with social tools.

This latest version of the HTML enables the designer and developer to create more readable code and build layouts that are semantically meaningful. It introduces advanced features that help you structure mark-up. Other HTML5 features are APIs, dragging, drawing graphics on screen, canvas, keygen, output and progress.

CSS3 is the latest module of CSS, Its much more advanced set of features makes this new version the tool of the future. Some distinctive aspects of CSS3 are features like “border radius”, “box shadow”, multiple background images and text shadow. Animations with CSS3 are made easy, subtle and lightweight.

Minimalism
Minimalism style of designing whether in a website or in print has the capability to create high visual impact designs that create a feeling of space and light. By the removal of superfluous elements and by retaining only essential elements, minimalist designs enhance the message and draw in the user.

Especially With the need for websites to be mobile-friendly, compatible and accessible, design has to be kept simple. The minimalistic approach is easier it is to navigate and comprehend.

Typography
Designers have started to use typography an integral part of the overall work rather than a liability and this trend will be more clearly seen in 2011. With HTML5, CSS3, and new typography programs, there will be many fonts available that do not slow down search engine optimization. With the growing numbers of tools and applications, typography will become a primary design element in its own right. A new trend has begun to gain strength and that’s utilizing big and bold fonts with the exclusive intention of grab the surfer’s attention.

Textured Backgrounds
As you look around in 2011, you’ll see how textures are being used in many different ways by Web designers. The grunge look that was so popular during the nineties has been reinterpreted and adapted to the present time, with a new style of combining grungy textures along with clean interfaces and bold typefaces.

One Page Websites
One pay layouts our like business cards and are becoming a common medium for users to “get straight to the point” - skills /services/products that the site is offering. The challenge for designers is to put everything you need in a single page in a way that will get the user attention and interest.

It’s a great way to have a large impact with a small amount of content.

Outsized Logos/ Headers
To make an unforgettable impression on the visitor, the trend for 2011 will be oversized logos on an equally oversized header. Since a header is the first impression a customer gets large and interactive headers with special offers, promotions, and calls to action help increase the number of conversions a website creates.

Hand-drawn Designs
In 2011 the trend towards incorporating hand drawn elements into web designs will be more widely seen. Hand drawn elements will be seen in navigation bars, as backgrounds, as accenting elements, or as an entire site theme. They charm of these hand drawn elements is that they give websites a very unique, out-of-the-box, and organic/realistic look; they can help to set surreal sceneries and also are more lightweight than complicated designs.

Modal Boxes (Lightboxes)
Modal boxes are basically the next generation of pop-ups and a leading trend in designing. They are a cleaner, more user-friendly alternative to the basic JavaScript popup windows that have been around for years. Clean, crisp, and focuses the user on the information you are presenting, whether it is a picture, text or a video. This little tool helps the presentation go a long way.

Enormous Images
Large scale backdrops will surge in 2011. These images will be high resolution, and covering the entire site. Large photos are an instant way to grab your audience - they cannot help but to see it and have an. Trends point to soft and slightly transparent imagery that does not over shadow your content, but harmonizes with it. Opinion about it can create the stunning visual effect and add more life to a site design compared to the traditional tiled.

Oversized Footer
Oversized footers may be everywhere already, but 2011 will find them even more exaggerated. Footers are becoming more important every day as designers realize that they’re a vital part of every design and they must be utilized with the same importance than the header.

Footers are now areas where you can place things like social stream boxes, contact forms and tons of information.

Author:
Sam Arora is a Search Marketing Specialist at BlueApple, a Web Development Company with a well connected development infrastructure in India having a strong portfolio of global clients offering superior, web design services and web application development solutions at competitive costs.

Tags: Business & Finance, Computer & Technology // 1 Comment »

E-learning projects have recorded some spectacular successes. These successes may suggest that your e-learning projects will work equally well. Reported success should encourage you but not convince you. As they say in the auto-mobile advertisements: “Your mileage may vary,” or, as is printed at the bot-tom of a stock prospectus: “Past results do not guarantee future performance.”

First, realize that only successful projects tend to be reported. If a project was not completed, or if its failure would embarrass the sponsors, the project will probably not make it into the academic or trade press. And, even if other projects have succeeded, their success may not signify much for your project if it differs in substantial ways. You have different goals, face different problems,and rely on different resources. By the time you complete your project, the conditions that led to success in earlier projects may have vanished. Or, new technology may offer solutions to problems that stymied earlier projects. In any case, someone else’s success does not benefit you. Only your success does that. Only your evaluation can measure your success.

Specific Reasons to Evaluate

Before evaluating e-learning, you need to be clear about why you are evaluating. Consider a few specific reasons to evaluate your e-learning:

• Justify investments in training. An effective evaluation can prove that training is not a net expense but a strong contributor to profit. Such proof can help training jump from the cost column to the benefit column in the mental ledger of top executives. Proving that training is an effective business investment spurs increased investment in training.
• Make better decisions about training. A proper evaluation process can aid in making informed business decisions regarding training, such as whether to buy, license, or build particular courses; whether to hire particular individuals or firms to develop training; which training media to use; and which internal and external suppliers to hire.
• Hold participants accountable. Evaluation reveals whether individual training departments, developers, instructors, facilitators, and suppliers delivered the results they promised.
• Demonstrate financial responsibility. Evaluation demonstrates to executives, stockholders, and employees that the training department is financially disciplined and clearly focused on the business goals of the overall organization.
• Improve training quality. Evaluation can measure the quality and effectiveness of various aspects of training, such as materials, instructors, facilities, and presentation techniques. It can identify areas that need improvement and ones that can serve as models of excellence.
• Encourage learning. The very process of evaluating learning focuses attention on results and encourages learners to try harder. Tracking job performance signals the importance of applying what was learned in training. The evaluation process may be more important than the data it gathers if it strengthens efforts to apply knowledge.

Anticipate Objections to Evaluation

For all the reasons to evaluate e-learning, there are as many concerns about evaluation, especially as commonly practiced. Though some objections to evaluation are ill informed, you should honestly consider them and be prepared to overcome them before embarking on the evaluation, AH these objections can be countered with a carefully crafted evaluation plan. That’s what this book is about. Here is a list of some of the common reasons for not evaluating e-learning:

• Evaluation is too expensive and difficult. Many training organizations believe they lack the budget, time, or skills necessary to mount an effective evaluation program without endangering their primary mission of conducting training.
• Results will be meaningless. Many in training fear that all the effort of an evaluation program may be pointless as it is nearly impossible to accurately gauge the effectiveness of training. Some fret that benefits are too subjective and ephemeral to measure and that they take too long to accrue.
• Irrelevant factors dominate results. Training can fail for reasons other than the training product itself. Real-world results have many causes. Many believe that it is too difficult to dissect out the effects of training. Anyway, e-learning is so new, much of what is measured will be the novelty effect.
• Evaluation is too political. In a highly contentious organization, the idea of evaluation can set off political battles and organizational paranoia. Who sets the criteria? Who is evaluated? Who sees results? Instructors who teach in classrooms and managers who preside over large training facilities may feel threatened if evaluation compares e-learning to conventional training.

Author Bio:

Rajesh Rastogi has been managing and maintaining various learning management system for the past five years. A storehouse of knowledge about elearning management systems he has been working in close co-ordination with firm providing elearning solutions.

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Here are techniques for business analysis and decision making that should help you as you implement your e-learning, Run through these techniques whenever you are making major decisions until they become second nature to you.

Trade-off. Every business decision is a trade-off. (If there’s no trade-off, there’s really no decision to be made.) List the pros and cons of the alternatives you are weighing. Try to be aware of what you’re trading off when making a decision.

Risk. Every decision is made with less-than-perfect information, and every decision entails taking a risk. The way to make sound decisions is to judge when you have enough information to move ahead and when the level of risk is acceptable. A decision maker who takes no risk receives no reward. A decision maker who disregards risk is a fool, a pauper, or both. Financial decisions trade off risk and reward. Make sure your upside reward outweighs your downside risk.

Empathy. To understand your customers, walk a mile in their shoes. Here’s how: Make up several representative customers (personas). Give them names, positions, preferences, gripes, habits, intelligence, and personalities. When you’re planning marketing campaigns and learning activities, stop every now and again to slip into these personas’ shoes. How does your proposal make them feel?

Inputs and Outputs. The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, describes the common situation where 20 percent of the effort achieves 80 percent of the results. Its not uncommon for 20 percent of the sales force to make 80 percent of the sales, or for 20 percent of the customers to generate 80 percent of the profits. It’s likely that 20 percent of your effort produces 80 percent of your results. The point is that input and output are not balanced. Marketers break the market into pieces, or segments, to identify and focus their attention on the significant few who produce most of the results.

For designers of learning experiences, less is often more. Find the elusive 20 percent of the learner’s time that yields 80 percent of what is learned and put your energies there.

The Bottom Line. Revenue minus costs equals profit. Over time, profit and shareholder value are the same thing. The total value of the shares is equivalent to the stream of expected future profits, discounted for the cost of capital. You must be able to relate your decisions and choices to the profitability of your organization. Otherwise, you will not be able to make sound decisions as conditions change.

A Core Focus. Shareholder value (also known as the market cap) is a function of sustained competitive advantage, and organizations achieve it by leveraging their core competencies. Focus on core; outsource everything else. Everything else is context (overhead), and context is a needless distraction. Without careful management, context always gets in the way of core because it absorbs time, talent, and management attention (Moore, 2000).

Business leaders present themselves to the world as confident, authoritative, conservative, results-oriented, deliberate, and a bit staid. Its best to leave your clown suit in the closet when you’re selling an e-learning concept to executives. Be concise. Hit the concepts described above as they apply to your project. When you’ve said your piece, ask for questions and sit down.

Author Bio:

Rajesh Rastogi has been managing and maintaining various learning management system for the past five years. A storehouse of knowledge about e-learning management systems he has been working in close coordination with firm providing elearning solutions.

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We pride ourselves here at Vanarama on keeping our range of available Volkswagen vans up-to-date with the latest models from the Volkswagen Caddy range.

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Our oldest pastime is telling stories. The key to storytelling is imagination. Radio once poked and evoked the imagination. Old-time Radio is the art of imaginative storytelling, something television can’t match.

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SEM- Search engine marketing is one of the most important aspects for businesses who sell products and services online or who use their websites to generate sales leads. SEM can provide valuable solutions for driving highly targeted visitors to your site.

SEM Marketing Strategies

There are a few SEM strategies that if done properly can generate customers and make your site a favorite among search engines.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the art of making your site more accessible to the search engine spiders, as well as getting the maximum number of pages indexed. It is all about incorporating practices that search engines and users want.

Many site owners do not understand that SEO should be taken into consideration before you build your site and not afterwards. Fortunately, SEO can also be done after a site is built, but this costs money and time. SEO is just a matter of understanding what search engines look for when they visit your site.

For this you need to concentrate on:

• Domain Names
• The Title Tag
• Meta Description and Meta Keyword Tags
• Content
• ALT Tags
• Site Map

Some practices are not SEO friendly and should be used sparingly or avoid:

• FLASH pages
• Dynamic Pages
• JavaScript

Keywords & Phrases

Before you start writing the content for your site you have to know which keywords and key phrases to use. Keywords or key phrases are the words or phrases that user’s type into search engines. For getting to know the best keywords or phrases you have to research your target users thoroughly and understand their needs and desires.

Search Engine Submission

Search engine submission is the most important step after SEO. This is important as this will get your sight listed among the search engines and directories.

There are three ways to get your site listed in a search engine or directory:

• Submit your site directly to the search engines through a free submit form.
• Through links to your site from other sites such as directories.
• Paying the search engine to index your site.

Link Popularity

Link popularity is a key factor in search engine marketing and ranking well in search engines and generating traffic to your site. Link popularity is the number of incoming links coming to your site from directories, articles, or web sites.

The most important link factors are:

• Getting Links to Your Site
• Checking Your Link Popularity Regularly

Paid Inclusion

Paid inclusion is a way of paying search engines to index pages from your site. This is a quick way of getting search engines to find and index your site. It is also called PPI (Pay per Inclusion). This is a good method to get noticed quickly, but in the end does not have a high ROI

Pay per Click Campaign

PPC is a form of online advertisement. The object of Pay per Click (PPC) search engine marketing is to drive targeted traffic to your website. You pay search engines money only when someone clicks on an ad on the search engine’s results page or homepage. Hence the terms ‘pay per click’ because you only pay when the visitor clicks on your ad. This may sound an easy way to high ROI, but can prove to be a headache if not managed correctly. Since it is not important that every visitor is converted to a customer, PPC has to be carefully targeted and controlled.

Organic Search Engine Optimization

Organic Search Engine Optimization is a process that involves analyzing and changing of the site’s underlying code, architecture and content in such a way that it is selected and ranked naturally by search engines i.e. without any payment involved.

Search engine marketing is as important as any other advertising method for the advancement of your business or product. Maybe it is more important as it is viewed globally by millions.

Author Bio:

Vishal Verma, a SEM expert works with Search Engine Marketing Firm consults clients about various SEO techniques and thorough follower of SEO Services India.

Tags: Computer & Technology // 80 Comments »

“Ken ‘Muck’ Meyer is the most famous radio talk show producer, ever,” says Dick Summer. “He was the best sidekick a talk host could hope to find,” says Dave Maynard, who spent 40 years on air at WBZ-AM. Steve Fredericks, on WMEX-AM, competed, in over nights, with WBZ-AM; Howard Lapides produced Fredericks and says of Meyer, “[He] played the key role, ‘Muck,’ that made the Glick show a hit.” Read the complete, compelling interview, with Ken Meyer, who made radio history making listeners happy.

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Facebook is the internets leading social media utility, which used shrewdly can generate a lot of traffic for your business. Facebook pages provide business to build up a consumer base, sell products, run promotions and interact with customers.

Steps to a Successful Facebook Campaign

Make it personal- people usually use Facebook to share personal information with friends. For you this means the more you display the human element of your business, your products and your people the more people will be drawn in generating traffic.

Facebook Groups -Groups are oldest and simplest way to build community around your brand or company on Facebook. By starting a group, you create a central place for customers, partners, and friends to participate in conversations around your brand. Facebook groups come with boards for posting discussion topics, photos, videos, and links right out of the box.

Update your Facebook pages regularly- Facebook thrives on new information and constant changes. This means you need to constantly add more new content to draw people in. You can do this by sending your fans announcements, special events, promotions, new products or other interesting tit-bits.

Use the News Feed – news feeds like RSS are the key to spread news quickly and efficiently. Facebook’s Mini Feed and News Feed archive your users’ engagement with your brand and syndicate it to their friends, networks, and beyond, amplifying the reach of your .When users become your fan, News Feed tells their friends and invites them to become fans as well. In turn, this can lead to the friends of their friends finding out about your business through their News Feeds, and so on in a cycle.

Choose the applications that are best for your business - Facebook and its outside developers have built thousands of free applications for businesses, bands, and every other type of organization. Your Page comes with the basics pre-installed, but you need to spice it up and add other applications that are right for your business. You can even build your own applications. The more useful your applications are to your customers, the faster your fan base will grow.

Promote your Page through Facebook Ads-these ads allow you to touch base with the right audience based on age, gender, geography, educational status, relationship status, and precise interests or keywords. Your ads should be socialized so that users’ interactions are reflected in the ads their friends see, increasingly the virality of your Page. Social Ads is completely self-serve and provides real time feedback on the size of your target audience and the suggested bid range to achieve impressions. Facebook offers both integrated and self-serve solutions to reach broader slices of the Facebook audience. Depending on your budget, you can get started as an advertiser on Facebook with as little as a few dollars for a short-run flyer or as much as several hundred thousand dollars for a customized “sponsored group” destination inside Facebook.

Polls- Polls offer an easy way for marketers to quickly conduct research within their targeted audience. Results are streamed in real time to a dashboard that allows marketers to break down results by gender and age. Based on your targeting preferences, you can get hundreds of responses within an hour.

Author Bio:

Sahil kumar is a development expert working with a Web Design India one of the top Web Application Development company in India.

Tags: Computer & Technology // 21 Comments »

The Google’s Android OS has started to become a serious competitor for Apple’s iPhone. Tremendous growth has been seen in the Android market and most of it is due to its web developing apps.

It’s especially perfect for the web developer on the move as it can test codes, fix errors or manage remote files while you are far from your PC or Laptop. The Android has developed free handy apps for web developers and designers making it a dream for web designers.

HTML Editor

The HTMLeditor is a perfect app that lets you code and test HTML JavaScript, and CSS. It also saves your work to your SD card so you can preview it in a stripped-down mobile browser. Though it doesn’t highlight errors as yet or render images while previewing, it is still a handy app for developers.

AndFTP

This practical JAVA app lets you access the web servers via the Android mobile. With versatile app you can upload, download, view, update (move, rename, delete) files from everywhere without a PC or laptop. It also manages to support information for multiple domains like FTP, SFTP and FTPS connections with exceptional user interface.

Silver Edit

Silver Edit is a simple code editor app that lets you code up full HTML, CSS, and PHP files, which can then be saved to your phone or you can send it to your email account. Together with the AndFTP app you can even build and push websites with the Android. Though this app is still on shaky grounds with some Android devices, it is stabilizing with every new version, of which version 3 is currently in development.

Photoshop

Adobes Photoshop the ultimate photo editing software is now available in the Android platform, but with limited functionalities of course as compared to its desktop version. You can crop, rotate, color-correct, and many more basic features for photo editing. You can upload and share your photos using your free photoshop.com account.

View Web Source

A simple yet effective app View Web Source allows you to view the page source of any website. You can scrutinize and download the entire source code of the page to its text editor. It has the ability to edit and manipulate the code, make comments, and save the files as well as copy and paste the HTML.

Mobile GA

The much loved Google Analytics is now available on the Android. GA is absolutely essential for analyzing any website, on the Android platform it supports Date range comparison, Graphs and charts for each report, Custom date ranges, Favorites, Geo-location reports, Regex-enabled searches. With its high security you can transmit your data without the need for third-party servers.

Dropbox

This device truly gives you the gift of mobility and is a boon for web designers, as you can store files on one computer and access it from any computer or hand held device. The Dropbox cloud based file backup device allows you access a remote document folder that you have stored on the server. It is an essential app for web application developers that work with files and documents that need to be shared across multiple computers and devices.

WordPress

For WordPress open source app facilitates bloggers by allowing them to write new posts, edit content, and manage comments with built-in notifications.

Thinking Space

Thinking Space is an Android app designed especially for web designers whose creativity explodes suddenly anywhere and anytime. The need to capture these ideas is paramount; this problem is solved with this natty app that maps out your ideas in a planned medium. Thinking Space is in sync with Google App Engine, which allows you to upload data to the cloud and access them from anywhere with the Android or through FreeMind (the open source PC version of the app).

Typography Junkies

Typography is an integral part of designing and web designers need to stay up to date about the latest developments. This is exactly what Typography Junkies for Android does, it provides with the current and hottest font news via videos, images, social media etc.

HTML Test

HTML is a great app for refreshing your HTML knowledge both for the experienced and the novice. This easy to use app tests your comprehension and understanding about HTML, by giving you you multiple-choice questions that you have to answer within a predefined time.

Author Bio:

Sahil Kumar is a Web Developer at BlueApple, a Web Development Company with a well connected development infrastructure in India having a strong portfolio of global clients offering superior web application development and solutions at competitive costs.

Tags: Computer & Technology // 50 Comments »