We started as a technology driven company and we still carry a very strong technical DNA. We consider technology as the gatekeeper for greatness. And we spend most of our work time iterating over ideas that produce tools that people actively use, as the balance between usability, simplicity and fit-to-purpose is a moving target.
We would like to use this opportunity to discuss what happened in Epignosis this year and our plans for the next one. So take a deep breath and let’s get started.
The products
TalentLMS is now over 32,000 learning portals strong and it grows at a pace of around 1,250 learning portals per month. On the infrastructure front, we experienced an up-time of over 99.99% which is among the very best in the industry. We also responded to 8,118 support messages. That’s up 68% over the previous 12 months.
Within 2015 we had 4 major product releases. Those releases added the ability to build a custom homepage, offered ample opportunities for blended learning, minimized the administrative overhead with automated actions, let you schedule reports delivery, introduced subscription payments and the calendar. The last release also introduced the mobile app. Altogether, there is no sign of slowing down for TalentLMS’ improvement. This sets the tone for 2016 as well.
eFront had its own share of important milestones. The product is now a complete rebuild that shares little similarity with the original eFront. Here is a link to this year’s releases for those of you who have some time to dig into the details. This year we also took the hard, but necessary decision to discontinue the open-source version of eFront. The reason behind this can be found in this post.
Finally, this year we introduced a micro-learning mobile app, called Snappico. The product uses the metaphor of cards to tell interesting stories, a card-per-day. Snappico is available for iPhone as we are speaking so go grab your copy. Currently there are over 350 topics to discover from English Civil War to how Aging works.
We consider micro-learning an important part of the future learning landscape. The micro-learning concept is still in its early stages, a bit clumsy and immature, but we’ve seen a number of products lately that share the same enthusiasm about its potential. For example, check Primer, the Google’s app for Marketing micro-courses.
The people
We grew considerable. We are now 25 people strong. I would like to welcome Eleni, Angel, Haris, Yannis, Chris, Alex, Maria, Thelxi, Simon, Lisa & Manolis. We keep hiring for next year so if you are into programming, marketing or sales check our open positions.
The content
Last year we accelerated our effort around content, with an emphasis on eFront’s and TalentLMS’ blog. Our posts are about eLearning topics spanning from tips to build better courses and eLearning industry coverage to new product releases and use cases. Altogether we released around 200 posts, accompanied with around 40 eLearning related videos (check them on the related TalentLMS’ and eFront’s YouTube channels). We even created an elearning tips podcast series!
The integrations
2015 was heavy in integrations. First of all, eFront got integrated with OpenSesame. This opened a number of opportunities for reusing ready-made, professional courses within eFront with minimal effort. eFront got integrated with Connections as well, the business social network platform from IBM. We are demonstrating this integration on IBM Connect conference from January 31 to Feb 3. TalentLMS integrated with Shopify and Woocomerce among others.
The misfortunes
Of’course, nothing is perfect in a non perfect world. This year we experienced a catastrophic failure of our official Youtube channel that took some time to recover from. This was an interesting lesson though you might want to read about.
Next year and beyond…
We have big plans for next year and with a bit of (always needed) luck we will deliver. Some things that are being “cooked” at the moment are native mobile apps for all products & H5P support for rich, interactive content building.
Regarding our long term plans, rest assure that we are here for the long run, making a sizable dent in the universe. Here is a post from Signal VS Noise blog that summarizes our view of doing business better than I would ever did.
And finally…
We would like to wish all of you the very best for 2016. Life is a journey and it always has some marvels across its path for everyone. Enjoy each moment!