New project & Vookbag
It's been a while since I have done a blog post, so now is a good time to blog about what I have going on in my life.
On November 1st of this year I got the opportunity to speak to a class at UNI that was using Vookbag in their class as an alternative to Blackboard Learning Systems. It was a good opportunity to gain feedback, especially because about 90% of students that use Blackboard absolutely despise of it, mainly because the user interface hasn't been updated since the 80's (not really), but probably since the early 2000's I would guess. I was also fortunate enough to get a sneak peek of what Blackboard has in store for this upcoming semester and I must say, it'll be pretty cool, but that's not their biggest problem right now. Their biggest problem they are facing is their brand they have destroyed. When someone hears of Blackboard Learning Systems they automatically think of "I hate that piece of shit!". Honestly. I'm not just saying this because Vookbag competes with it. It honestly needs to be improved and it is becoming more modernized. It's got more features than any other website I've ever saw that is in the learning management software industry. I feel that Blackboard has totally lost their customer loyalty and it will need to rebuild completely if it wants a chance to compete with a few of the upcoming LMS's on the market today.
Anyways, from the feedback that I gained from the class using Vookbag and from a survey that my friends and I conducted, we've decided to turn our focus to a new project for the time being. We were finding that it was difficult for students to find a time to meet up for a group meeting and got responses that really started getting us thinking. Students were saying that they would be willing for a service that would be taking care of their needs for finding a time to meet or where to meet for their group project.
We kept doing some more research and have found a need for software for "groups", both personal use and business/organizational use. This project we are working on now is called, "Groupconnect" for now that is. We've spent countless hours trying to decide what in the hell we were going to call this project. At first it was called, "Grouplr", so we bought the domain names necessary and then we decided that didn't tell a good enough story about what we wanted to accomplish with this project, so we went back to the drawing board. It then hit me when I was on my way to work. I suddenly thought of Groupconnect, not why it hit me then, but it did. It sounded smooth and rolls of the tongue well. Check it out here: http://groupconnecthq.com. I'm pretty proud of it. A few of my friends (Joe Sorenson...you can find him here at his Twitter account: @joebearsorenson & Thomas Gilbert...his Twitter account is here @thegibbs and I have spent quite a bit of hours in the past month or two working on it. It's coming together quite nicely.
I've been not spending as much time with Vookbag as a few people may want, but it's still in the back of my mind and as of last week it was solely meant to be a learning management system, but it may be changing soon.
Before developing Vookbag we never really looked at all of the guidelines that Universities have to follow and how tough it actually is to penetrate the market. So far, I've learned alot when developing Vookbag and continue to this day learning more and more about software businesses, but I've got an idea that would change Vookbag's focus immensely. The only hint I can give away is that it will make anyone that has ever wanted to be a teacher or instructor that doesn't have a teaching certification possible to become one and will be able to charge whatever they want for teaching something they are great at. This would be a great way to make money on the side.