Jane Hart's round-up this month includes: conference calls that bridge business and social networking; an online marketplace for training and learning modules; interactive 'warts and all' living case studies; and Jay Cross' online conversations about corporate learning.

Calliflower
Calliflower makes it easy for people to plan, participate and follow-up on conference calls that bridge business and social networks. With Calliflower there's more to a conference call than just "the call": Before the call, manage invites, agendas and notes; During the call, be productive and take control with a wide variety of features; After the call, keep your sessions alive with a permanent archive, recordings, and more.

Conversations about corporate learning
Jay Cross is leading online conversations about Learning. Thirty minutes of give and take. Die-hards may keep the conversation going for a full hour. Sessions are recorded. Invite your friends and colleagues. Free to participate:
internettime.pbwiki.com/Conversations%20about%20Learning

Coggno marketplace
Coggno, Inc. a software company that specializes in elearning applications, recently announced the release of its online marketplace where authors can create and disseminate their proprietary training and learning modules. The Coggno marketplace facilitates the transfer of intellectual property between subject matter experts and creators of that information and those wishing to acquire it. By using Coggno’s content creation and deployment tools, training and learning modules can be created in the Coggno marketplace where organizations and individuals can search, review, acquire, and purchase them.

Raids
Raids are highly interactive “warts and all” living case studies where learning professionals hear direct from an experienced manager about a project, and share practical experience with fellow raiders. The next Raid is 'Training that raises a Company Profile' on 15 October 2008 at Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines in Southampton. This Raid takes place onboard "Independence of the Seas", Royal Caribbean's newest most innovative ship which is the largest ever to be home-ported in Europe. It looks at how this high-profile company is blending an award-winning e-Learning program, a residential bonding seminar and an online community to help raise awareness for its brand in a competitive market, with the aim impacting sales via a network of travel agents. It would be of interest to anyone interested in the practical application of technology to help improve business.

Present.ly
Present.ly is a micro-update communications tool for your company. Give your employees the ability to instantly communicate their current status, ask questions, post media, and more. Twitter revolutionised public communication by creating organic networks for one-to-many updates. Present.ly brings this revolution to your business with tools and features custom tailored for a work environment. It's a behind-the-firewall-Twitter, a range of account types, groups generation and a Twitter-compatible API.

Google Apps now includes Google Video
Google Video is now included in the Premier edition of Google Apps. Allows you to share rich video information and keep videos secure and private. There are no large files or complex infrastructure and everyone at your company can contribute – Employees can share videos instantly. Viewing and annotating doesn't require any special software, just a standard browser. The cost is $50 / user account / year. There is a limited time offer of 30-day trial.

authorSTREAM
authorSTREAM launches a new feature for sharing PowerPoint presentations live. Just upload your PowerPoint presentation and share the 'Present Live' link with your contacts. All your contacts can then watch and discuss the same presentation. You can click through the slides and everyone attending will be on the same slide. Animations work the same way as in your PowerPoint file. Chat with attendees in a common chat area. Call them on your favorite VoIP application like Skype or using the good old conference call and voila, you are in a live web meeting. Present Live is free for authorSTREAM members

TeemingPod
TeemingPod is a platform for embedded social interactions. For Web developers, TeemingPod provides a platform that helps build powerful social interactions right inside their Web applications or Web sites. For users, TeemingPod provides a small place on any Web page to get together and to interact on-the-spot, while staying on the page.

Lithium
Lithium Technologies provides solutions for building successful enterprise communities, including forums, chat, and other social networking tools. Lithium's management hub provides all the controls for managing your community. Through a single, web-based dashboard for all of Lithium's products, administrators monitor or manage all functions of the community, including permissions, user rankings, metrics, layout options, and abuse report management. The result is that non-technical administrators can perform many of the tasks traditionally managed by IT or developers, reducing operating costs and increasing agility.

Innov8
INNOV8 is an interactive, 3-D business simulator designed to teach the fundamentals of business process management and bridge the gap in understanding between business leaders and IT teams in an organization. This type of serious gaming - simulations which have the look and feel of a game but correspond to non-game events or processes such as business operations - has emerged as a successful method to train students and employees and accelerate the development of new skills.

Jane Hart is head of the Centre of Learning and Performance Technologies. For more information go to www.c4lpt.co.uk. Or you can email here at: Jane.hart@c4lpt.co.uk.
For a daily item of elearning interest, take a look at her blog, Jane's elearning pick of the day</strong.