Sonic Academy, Belfast

Sonic Academy is billed as ‘the place to come to for anyone who wants to get to grips with the latest music technology’.

At its core the site offers a comprehensive collection of video tutorials showing DJs, producers and musicians how to make the most out of the latest music technology.

Subscriptions run between £7.99 and £9.99 a month including access to tutorials, technical support from professional tutors, downloadable project files, samples and a range of partner discounts.

Of course, there’s more.

Far from just selling subscriptions, Sonic Academy run live workshops with schools, delivered accredited courses, produce magazine-style features and reviews and boast a growing community of tens of thousands of enthusiasts.

All this is driven by an impressive list of industry pros that bring both expertise and authenticity to the project.

Online learning is becoming increasingly big business – and potentially a great business model for companies that can really deliver in terms of expertise, passion and the quality of their training and tutorials.

Site: www.sonicacademy.com

In celebration of St Patrick’s Day, this week we’ll be focusing exclusively on interesting businesses and entrepreneurs from the island of Ireland, both North and South.

Grace, Wicklow

Inspired by an advertisement displaying the graphical interface of an iPhone, a Wicklow-based mother of two, Lisa Domican, has launched an iPhone application designed to help autistic children develop their communication skills.

The application (named Grace after Lisa’s daughter) is similar to the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) which is frequently used in teaching autistic children and those with other learning difficulties. Children uses pictures to build up sentences, and as they learn more words these are added to their ‘books’ mirroring their growing vocabulary.

The iPhone app brings added portability (PECS is usually delivered on a board game style or velcro board), makes communicating progress between parents and teachers (and vice versa) simpler and makes it easy to add new words over time.

It was built in conjuction with developer Steve Troughton-Smith (with the support of Telefonica O2 Ireland) and has already been trialled in a local school for autistic children – and in Lisa’s own home.

“As the mother of two children with autism, I know it works, I’ve seen the positive impact it has had on my own children, and therefore I can confidently recommend it to other parents and tutors of children with autism.”

The app is available via the iPhone App Store at €29.99 for up to five users, allowing family members to access the app.

Source: SiliconIreland

A few weeks ago we featured Ooh.com a marketplace where (mostly) micropreneurs can promote courses, workshops and events that they run.

Given the range of interesting ideas that have already found their way onto the site, it seems to me that there’s an entire ‘show and tell’ economy that offers talented people (and forward-thinking businesses) an opportunity to profit from their skills and passions.

Case in point: Italy’s gelato university

Run by equipment manufacturer Carpigiani, Gelato University features a series of six courses (each lasting 3 days) designed to help train entrepreneurs who want to enter the gelato business – and help ‘upskill’ people who are already involved in the industry.

Around 6,000 take the courses every year and additional short (1/2 day) introductory sessions have proven popular worldwide.

But even if ice cream isn’t your thing, Gelato University has something to teach us. In fact, it has two somethings:

People will pay to learn to do what you do

Education is big business but there’s also a sizable market for ‘experiences’ – people interested in trying out something new rather than spending their weekends at the mall or holidays stuck in tourist traps. Put the two together and you’ve got a useful and usable market for both professional development and ‘fun’ courses.

If they can do it with ice cream then you can do it with flower arranging or pottery or property or animation or whatever it is that floats your own particular boat.

And existing businesses can do it too

Carpigiani not only generate revenues from their courses but they also do a good job of growing their potential market and brand awareness. Zappos does something very similar with customer care courses.

And a jeweller could do it with jewellry making courses, a plumber with DIY workshops or a restaurant with a cookery school and tasting nights. A nightclub could generate new revenues with DJ training or ‘DJ for a day’ events. A writer could earn a bit extra with a creative writing club.

In fact, it’s a lot easeir to think of businesses and professions that can do this than come up with a list of those that couldn’t.

So creamy Italian treats aside, what could you teach people to do?

There are a lot of coaches out there – business coaches, life coaches, social media coaches, coach coaches. But despite the numbers, it is surprisingly rare to find someone doing anything even a little different in this space.

Cath Duncan has decided to do just that with The Bottom Line Book Club – an online coaching program that uses well-known personal and professional development books as source material.

The idea is to help busy professionals cut down on their ‘required reading’ each month and get ‘the bottom line’ on a given book. This goes beyond simple summaries to include detailed interpretations of the books and explanations of how the writer’s main themes can be further explored and applied.

Members are given access to a short audio seminar, PDF manual and workbook that highlight the key themes and help to start putting these ideas into practice. The downloadable resources are followed by a series of practical ‘self-coaching’ emails every other day designed to reinforce the concepts and prompt action.

To take things a step further, founder Cath Duncan, also conducts interviews with the author, or another subject matter expert, discussing the themes raised.

Membership runs from £9 to £16 a month (the higher price includes access to the interview and archives) and Bottom Line guides to individual titles can be purchased for £12.

Creating Your Own Bottom Line

This ‘curated consumption’ model fits neatly into cash rich, time poor lifestyles where people are seeking out reliable curators to help them navigate their own particular information needs.

So the obvious question is, how could you do the same in a subject matter or niche you know and enjoy?

Well, let’s unpick the business model a bit:

• Start with a subject you enjoy and know, for Cath it was personal development
• Find your potential customers’ pain points. Virtually every industry and pastime produces more ‘must-read’ information than any one person could hope to digest. Helping people get to the bottom line, quickly, is a valuable service.
• See where you can add value. Go beyond summaries and look for ways to add context or make abstract concepts practical.
• Find a structure. Bottom Line Book Club is primarily a subscription-based model and uses PDFs and audio downloads. Look for formats that will suit your market.

We can see this model being applied to just about any topic. How about the bottom line on trade journals, industry-specific book clubs or the latest conferences and events in your field?

Site: www.bottomlinebookclub.com

We’ve covered plenty of iPhone apps on this site over the last twelve months – and with good reason, mobile applications have proven one of the fastest growth areas in terms of digital media, services and software.

Education too is becoming a big part of the mobile application market. Back in November we covered how one firm, Mental Workout, was partnering with subject matter experts to produce mobile applications designed to help people ‘resolve issues and increase mental performance’.

Taking a slightly less mental approach to getting a good workout, software company Whagaa is developing a range of instructional mobile applications under their GoLearn brand, including topics like skateboarding, fitness, pole dancing and soccer.

Like Mental Workout, Whagaa partner with recognised brands in their chosen niches to produce the content and then sell the applications through iTunes.

Each title is made up primarily of short video tutorials so it’s easy to see how the brand could be extended into areas like cooking (in development), arts and music, other sporting niches or just about anything else.

Site: www.whagaa.com

]]> http://www.iddictive.com/2010/01/06/whagaa-iphone/feed/ 1 http://www.iddictive.com/2009/12/10/rorys-story-cubes-innovation-on-your-iphone/ http://www.iddictive.com/2009/12/10/rorys-story-cubes-innovation-on-your-iphone/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:05:47 +0000 Mark Nagurski http://www.iddictive.com/?p=1020

Story cubes are made up of nine dice featuring an array of images (parachutists, phones, turtles …) designed to be used in a kind of word association – helping anyone from school kids to business people brainstorm and tell their stories. Simply roll the dice, start your story with ‘once upon a time …’ and off you go.

The objective is to combine all nine images into a single story but you can take this basic concept and ‘spin’ it a little differently for your own uses. As Rory notes at the end of the video below, they can be used in all sorts of settings:

• in the classroom as a literacy aid
• practicing a second language
• as a creative writing, music or drama prompt
• as an ice breaker in a social or business setting

Story Cubes on Your iPhone

I actually first saw this when I spoke with the creator (Rory O’Connor) a few months back. At that time Rory’s Story Cubes were just that – 9 cubes designed to fuel creativity – but now a new iPhone version is set to help propel this smart little concept into the big time.

When I met with Rory he took me through a business exercise to identify my own company’s core messaging. Starting with a fittingly entrepreneurial roll of the dice, he prompted me to select the images that immediately caught my eye and describe how they related to my business or how they made me feel about my business.

I won’t go into the detail of the brain melt that occurred after our meeting but suffice to say, Rory’s Story Cubes are one of the most effective ways I’ve encountered of getting the creative juices flowing.

Site: www.storycubes.com or www.thecreativityhub.com/storycubes

E-learning is an industry that has been consistently touted as one of the ‘next big things’. And while the reality has not always lived up to the hype (as it rarely does) innovative companies have been quietly getting on with the job of making the e-learning concept work in practice.

Learning Pool is a pretty good example of just such a company. Originally set up in 2002 by IDeA, the Improvement and Development Agency for local government, Learning Pool has been run privately by two Northern Ireland-based entrepreneurs since 2006. In a little over two years, it has grown to employ over 35 staff and provide services to over 86% of councils across the UK.

The idea for Learning Pool was actually inspired by the success of music sharing website Napster. In the same way that Napster allowed users to share content across a central platform, Learning Pool was conceived to deliver a similar service to the UK public sector.

Collectively, councils and other public sector bodies are responsible for delivering training courses to tens of thousands of staff and members of the public. Despite the fact that many of the topics are equally applicable from one council to the next, each council (or even individual departments within a public sector body) have traditionally created their own training courses – resulting in duplication and unnecessary expense.

Learning Pool’s primary offering is a subscription-based service that allows individual public sector bodies to dip into a central pool of e-learning courses – many developed by other participating councils – which they can then re-brand and rework for their own needs.

Learning Pool not only provides the platform and onsite creation tools to make the process simple, but also develop their own courses and course content to fill identified gaps. Indeed Learning Pool have successfully leveraged their position as a platform to help identify  new opportunities within the market – leading to hugely successful products aimed at school governors and local councillors.

The next steps will likely include taking their expertise to new markets in N. America and ex-British colonies in Asia and Africa with similar local government structures.

Learning Pool succeeds not because of an aggressive sales strategy or technical expertise (they often make use of open source software in their projects) but by creating a platform and community that are changing the way their industry does business.

It’s a business model that has helped business from Etsy to eBay and Twitter to the iPhone dominate their marketplace.

Site: www.learningpool.com

Adult literacy programs can often suffer due to the lack of appropriate resources geared towards adults. Adults with reading difficulties may often feel embarrassed – and books about ‘Dick and Jane’ don’t help.

Quick Reads are short, exciting books written by bestselling authors and celebrities and priced at just £1.99. Their size aside, they look almost indistinguishable from a standard novel and cover topics that actually interest adults.

The program, now in its fourth year, is a collaboration between authors, publishers, government bodies and the BBC (amongst others). Indeed with works from bestselling authors Ian Rankin and popular TV shows like Dragon’s Den, the books are also proving popular with more regular readers who enjoy the fast paced, short format.

This year’s batch of ten Quick Read’s were released on World Book Day, earlier this month.

Site: www.quickreads.org.uk