Joshua Guffey

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We all know a little something about something that lots of others know nothing about. But what if you could share that thing you know more easily? And with a global community that’s looking to learn about this topic of yours? This is exactly what Udemy makes possible.

I had the chance to interview Gagan Biyani, Co-Founder and President of Udemy, about his beta service. When Gagan describes his service he shares that “we want to be the WordPress of online education”; that is, to enable the typical user to produce and distribute their educational content without first needing a degree in computer science. The concept is powerful and from what I can tell, theirs is a unique offering on the web.

Udemy offers community features such as user profiles, course discussion boards and the ability to share courses on many major social media and news outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg and others. Users can create a ‘course’ that others can subscribe to, so these courses are capable of being an ongoing project that users can engage with over time as they expand.

Currently all courses are free but in the next few months you’ll have the ability to charge a fee for your course–opening the door to earning an income from what you’re sharing. Something many people would jump at the chance for–still it remains to be seen if users will pay for courses. My guess is that monetization of courses will depend largely on the type of content, the quality of the information and the perceived authority of the author.

Let’s hear more from Gagan:

What is your background? What did you do before?
I grew up in Silicon Valley and have always been involved in technology. My dad was an engineer and so is my brother. So, when I went to Berkeley for undergrad in Economics, I already sort of knew I wanted to get into the tech industry. After graduating, I went to Accenture to be a strategy consultant for high-tech companies. 6 months after I joined Accenture, I was bored out of my mind and started reading TechCrunch religiously. Pretty soon, I was writing for TechCrunch’s mobile site, MobileCrunch, and enrolled in the Founder Institute. And the rest is history.

How did Udemy come to be?
Udemy was started by a group of brilliant developers in Turkey about 2 years ago. Eren Bali and Oktay Caglar were licensed to build a learning platform on a contract basis. After building it, they actually owned all the IP and decided to make it free to the public. Turkey wasn’t the optimal place to do this so they spent the last year or so moving to the Silicon Valley. Eren joined the Founder Institute and brought me on during the institute as a co-founder.

How would you describe Udemy? What is your vision for the platform?
Udemy wants to be the best place to teach and learn online. It’s simple, really. We want to be the WordPress of online education. The same way that Blogger and LiveJournal democratized online publishing, Udemy’s goal is to make it fast, easy and free to publish online educational content. If you’re the best knitter in the world, we want you to use Udemy to teach knitting. The same goes for Photoshop, Wrestling, Speech and Debate, Poker and other markets.

What content and courses would you most like to see created on the platform?
We are a content agnostic platform. That means we don’t want to dictate what type of courses are created on Udemy, as long as smart people are using our product to teach others. If you’re smart and other people like hearing you talk or teach, you should be able to use Udemy, and we’d be happy to have you!

It appears that Udemy is strictly a free service. Are there plans to offer a paid level of service? How do you plan to monetize the site?
Our goal is for Udemy to remain free for anyone to create courses. In the future, educators can make money by charging for their courses on Udemy and we will do a revenue-share with them (15-30%). That aligns our interests with those of our educators, which is extremely important for us.

What can you tell us about where you are taking Udemy?
Udemy will be the best platform available for teaching online. We provide multiple tools such as uploading videos, posting presentations, writing blog posts, and hosting virtual classroom sessions. Over time, you will see the list of tools increase (making tests/quizzes, tracking of students), but they will center around the same goal: providing a one-stop shop for online education. In the future, we don’t want anyone to have to hack a blog or create their own online education website; they will use Udemy for free and then spend their time on what they do best: teaching.

What type of community features are available on Udemy?
Udemy enables you to privately message other users and there’s a discussion board on each course so that users can interact with the instructor. In the future, you’ll be able to rate and comment on courses so the community will grow in that way as well. We look forward to seeing you on Udemy and thanks for your time, Josh!

As a whole Udemy is an interesting offering with promise. I’m interested to see where things go with it from here. If you have some subject matter that really interests you and would like the opportunity to teach to a worldwide community, I’d encourage you to take a look at creating a course on Udemy to see if it might be the right choice.

For more ways to engage with your community and teach what you love online, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog.

We’re all very well connected these days. That’s good! But without some specialized filters the real-time web and social media can certainly start to take over our lives.

I recently posted a screencast about how Syphir can make Gmail more manageable and powerful.  Now I want to show you how you can use Syphir to delay your Facebook comments from showing up in your Gmail inbox until you’re ready for them.

Take a look at the screenshot below to see what the filters rules and actions are. Then head over to Syphir and create your own filters to manage web-overload.

Tech startup Placethings is doing what I’d hoped augmented reality would do, putting user-generated media into physical locations using the multimedia and geotagging capabilities of today’s mobile devices.

The service will capture any type of multimedia; such as pictures, video, audio and text and will ‘place’ this content in a physical location by linking it to GPS coordinates for others to view and interact with.

The company presented at the Mobilize 2008 Conference [video here].  At the conference they discussed how you will have the ability, with your mobile device, to create ‘persistent media’ which will remain tied to that location for others to view and even reply to.  This could transform the way we interact with venues around our home towns, help us to meet interesting people in our area, learn more about our environment and share relevant information about any place any time.  Think of it as writing on an ‘invisible’ wall, anywhere.

It’s a compelling idea that opens up a lot of possibilities.

You could post pictures of concerts, leave messages in places you know that your friends frequent or play location-based geotagging games.  Businesses could keep tabs on what sorts of activities are taking place local to their business and adjust their offerings or other aspects of their business to make better use of this information.  There are a million uses for adding an informational media layer to our existing experience. Not to mention that it’d be loads of fun!

In their presentation the co-founder, Dean Terry, mentions that there’s even a ‘secret message’ function so that you could leave a message at a specific location for someone.  When that person visits that location they receive their message.  This immediately makes me think of leaving digital love notes for my wife, but I’m sure you could think of some less nauseating examples.

I actually see services such as Placethings as poised to become more popular than the check-in trend happening right now with Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Buzz and the like.  Without going to far down the rabbit hole, my thinking on this is that check-ins are real-time; and for location-based services this could be a problem since it’s kinda like saying “I’m not home, please rob me“.  All of these services could likely do well to have a delay built into them for safety.

As for Placethings, I cannot say if it is real-time (likely it is) but the shift of focus from geotagging as person-centric to location-and-media-centric may be a healthy direction to take things.

What uses would you find for this? How would you use it or like to see it used?

Social Network Connections

When you’re new to Social Networks
If you’re getting started in social media from a business standpoint you may feel inclined to join Facebook, Twitter and every other social network you find and become active on each. This impulse is good and I would argue that doing so will help you to stay current, relevant and accessible for your customers and in your industry; however, I would offer a few words of caution and some direction for what may not yet have revealed itself to be an rather ambitious task.

“So I put up my profile and friend a bunch of people?”

Uh, no.

Consider that each of these networks are really new forms of communication. They go both ways. Yes they are powerful. Yes you could get great exposure. And yes they can even be fun ways of growing your business. But remember, if you are to use them effectively, they are also work. I know many of you shuddered just reading that. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Think about it…every new network is a new point of contact, a new ’inbox’ to manage. And each social network comes with it’s own technical learning curve. So without totally frightening you away from social media as a new channel for communication between you, your current and potential clients and your industry as a whole, I’d like to offer a few suggestions about how to begin; because I do believe that in most cases the benefits outway the hurdles.

Focus your social efforts

Don’t try to learn more than one major social network at once. Give yourself enough time to learn one well enough to maintain it and to move forward with it before you take on another. This may be a month or two for you or it may be a longer or shorter process. You’ll know when you’ve got it handled. You’ll be engaged and responsive on that network. You’ll be in relevant conversations and you’ll be expanding your connections all the time.  Just don’t be ‘that guy’.

Engaging in multiple social networks simultaneously can be a bit overwhelming, especially if you’re just learning the ‘social ropes’. There’s a new language to learn, etiquette to grasp and mental bandwith to appropriate.

Here I’m mostly referring to Facebook and Twitter. Yes they’re both very big, very busy and potentially a great place for you to setup and begin building a reputation, a sense of ‘authority’ (I’m not super fond of this term as it seems to be used frequently in a matter as to suggest deception or subverting the natural process of becoming recognized in a giving space, but you get the point) and also a sense of connection with an interested community. Notice I didn’t say audience; that isn’t what social media is about. It’s about actual interaction. Forget that and you’re in trouble.

I would go ahead and grab your username at each major site so as to secure brand integrity, but I wouldn’t actually become active on each until I’m ready to integrate a new inbox and a new community of individuals into my social media efforts.

I know that I just got finished saying essentially “don’t do this unless you’re going to do it right” and now I seem to be contradicting myself, but there’s actually a really simple solution. What I would suggest is that on whichever social networks you’ve decided are less relevant for your intial social media expansion (more on this in another post) simply make a statement that tell people where you ARE focused right now.

Your “Sorry, I’m out” message

It may read something like this:

“Thank you for visiting me (or your business name) on Facebook. It’s important to me that I’m able to respond to you so I’m choosing to focus only on Twitter at this time. I’d love to connect with you there (I’m @JoshuaGuffey) or feel free to send me an email. Thank you!”

It doesn’t have to be long, elaborate or particularly elequant. Just tell them what’s up and where to find you and express an honest
appreciation. I’ll get more into choosing a network to focus on later. Until then, you can go grab your name in the places you think you might setup shop and write a little blurb directing people to somewhere to connect. Even if that’s just email address or blog. At least you’re being straight-forward and making an effort.

Add your thoughts!
I’m sure there are important points that I missed.  What would you like to add to the comments section?

photo credit: marc_smith