This release features tighter enterprise integration for search and single point authentication. If you already have a MS Sharepoint deployment within your organization, kPoint now seamlessly integrates with MS Sharepoint search and transparently delivers an improved search experience to all Sharepoint users. Hosted kPoint service can now work with a SAML server in your organization and can give you the complete benefit of a well-established authentication framework in your organization. We also have made headway in the tablet world; all new kPoint kapsules created on release 6.0 can be played on an Apple iPad. In other usability related enhancements, the tuning wizard now simulates a real time ‘Attendee’ and ‘Presenter’ behavior to enable you to tune your peripheral audio and video equipment for the best experience.

The release was driven by our customer’s needs. We have worked hard to deliver those features in the most usable manner suitable to our corporate customers. We would like to hear from you about the new release and how it helps you provide Just In Time Training to their extended enterprise.

We have now switched to ‘kpoint.com’, so please remember to change you bookmarks to the same!

Check out this new release at http://demos.kpoint.com today and give us your feedback.

kPoint comes handy in such situations. On kPoint, people can record their knowledge which enables companies to preserve it and others can consume it as per their convenience so that knowledge propagates. One can also design custom courses on kpoint which people can consume. Course designer can also get feedback about how his course is consumed through reach analytics provided by kPoint, this gives them real insight into it. People can also collaborate around such courses which adds real value to it for later reuse.  kPoint’s distribution platform also provides searchability till spoken words of people, helping them quickly and efficiently jump into videos saving their time and increasing throughput.

All in all kPoint is a platform that companies can leverage to preserve and propagate knowledge in timely and cost effective manner.

Remember the first time you heard yourself?   The voice mail you had left for a friend who played it back for you?  The home video where you were talking loudly in the background?  Unbelievable. It wasn’t you!

What then of how we look like in a video?  Face too fat, too small a head for our body, too big a head…the insecurities we feel as humans are numerous and it’s a wonder we live our lives every day! It’s not so much what we look like, we still have friends who have dinner with us, our employees and coworkers don’t flee when you enter the room, and customers do answer your phone call.  It’s our self-consciousness that bothers us the most.

This is a significant issue for most presenters when multimedia is used to capture a presentation or training.  We can write volumes, read by hopefully anyone, without the slightest tremor. But the one five minute video you put out expounding on javaScript may keep you awake at night wondering how you will be perceived.

But enough of our vanity, let’s think of the people watching.  Your employees who might want to have a closer connection with you, your students who learn better when you explain a concept, who look forward to seeing you and hearing your familiar voice, all of them stand to benefit more directly from such media.

Remember the recent video making the rounds of Steve jobs speaking at a university graduation?   Now think of reading plain text about living life with the knowledge of your certain mortality. Not quite the same thing.

So try all the possibilities of using video and audio to broadcast your message.  While everyone might not love your face the way your mother does, it’s a valuable human connection for your employees, students and customers.

In our experience, factors such as network infrastructure to handle wide spread use, video life-cycle management, integration with established enterprise systems, and managing user-generated content are factors that we encounter amongst most of our customers.  There is one hurdle that really stands tall is ease of consumption.

Compare video adoption with that of text-oriented web.  The landmark event that led to wide-spread adoption of the web was emergence of text-based search engines.  In addition, our commonly found ability to consume text at a higher speed as compared to viewing video did the trick without us knowing it.  So what are the equivalents for the fast emerging video web?

Well, our view is that all content associated with any video – and not just the textual meta-data such as titles, author, and tags – must feed the search and index infrastructure of the text-based web.  So, the spoken word must also get indexed by the search engines.

And, video consumption must be significantly enhanced through easy and precise navigation to any part of the video.  So, for example, one should be able to quickly look inside a one hour webinar and view exactly what one needs.

kPoint weaves both of these unique aspects into the user experience.

kPoint cloud supports out-of-the-box SAML based user authentication, as shown in the diagram:

In a typical setup of an organization:

The corporate directory server runs inside the intranet boundary and remains accessible to all internal applications.

• For rest of the externally hosted applications and cloud based services, the organization sets up a SAML IDP (Identity Provider). This SAML IDP internally talks to the corporate directory server for user authentication and user profile data access.
• kPoint cloud acts as a SAML SP (Service Provider) and talks to this SAML IDP over HTTPS for user authentication.
• The IDP returns the result in the form of SAML assertions.
• kPoint cloud listens to these assertions, extracts authentication result and other user profile data  and then seamlessly establishes the kPoint session for the end user on successful authentication.

Thus kPoint cloud securely and seamlessly leverages the user authentication service offered by the corporate directory server via SAML.

Those who express themselves are interested in knowing how people react to their thoughts, opinions or artistic expressions.  The interest in feedback on one’s work can range from curiosity to business criticality.  However, prevalent feedback mechanism for multimedia content is still in the form of comments that one has to scroll through and surmise the context.  Any correlation to the original video is in the form of “at 3 minutes and 5 seconds I saw such and such and here is my comment on that”.  That is just old school!

Now, imagine, if you commented on a video about a certain spot and stated “this move is cool”.  For the next viewer, “this” does not mean anything unless you describe it OR state exactly where in the video it is (e.g. 3 mins, 5 secs).  Similarly, while watching a training video, a question pops in your head that you want to ask the author of the video.  It is not efficient to do this with mere comments though that’s the way it is done today.  Or, what if you missed attending a webinar and are now watching a recording of it and would also like to answer the questions popped in the webinar when it was delivered live.  This can keep the webinar interesting for you instead of watching a monotonous video.   It is clear that interacting with video needs to get more sophisticated than just commenting on them.

kPoint strives to solve this problem by making interaction of training videos easy and intuitive.

The knowledge growth essentially implies that there are growing numbers of people who either produce or consume knowledge.   These people are called ‘knowledge-workers’.  The term became so common that Oxford dictionary too adopted it.

The knowledge workers needed tools to codify his knowledge.  The emergence of text authoring tools (such as MS Word, Adobe’s PDF’s) did satisfy the need.  Documents were produced. They were read and understood.

While this worked well in past,  in recent times we have seen pronounced structural changes:  Knowledge complexity has increased; it needs to be transmitted across geographies and cultures at faster speed.  More importantly, people need to absorb the knowledge at a quick pace.  Say, earlier one could afford, two hours to understand a topic.  Now he/she can afford only one hour for the same.

In addition, we have too many people generating the content. The content generation has gone to masses.  This commoditized environment has given way to new term ‘user generated content’.  The elitist word ‘knowledge worker’ has taken back seat.

kPoint addresses the need of the modern world ‘Knowledge worker’ nay the ‘user’.  With kPoint, users can harness power of all media-types to express thoughts.  She can use voice, video, documents, writing and annotations.  No more struggle to convert the ‘multi-dimensional mental images’ to one-dimensional text in MS Word.

What’s more, the process is geared for masses:  With kPoint user needs just a desktop and may be a headset to create content.

Without kPoint,  users struggle to express the thoughts.  With kPoint, expression is a natural outcome.

Sal Khan is a star teacher and we at kPoint subscribe to many of his ideas related to teaching and education. But where Sal Khan deals with pure form of knowledge in academia, the kPoint focuses on more mundane manifestation of knowledge – in the forms of information, instructions, process guidelines etc.  May not be as profound as pure knowledge but
nobody can argue on their necessity and importance. Imagine you going through that manual while struggling to put your new IKEA furniture together. A video on IPad explaining each of the steps pointing to the pages of your manual would certainly help. But wait a minute – as internet video is not as reliable as electricity or telephone line you wonder how would you scuffle for information other than playing your luck on a video seek bar.  kPoint has the answer, it makes going through a video clip as obvious as going through pages of a book you flip, you turn, you look at the index – and wonderfully enough you can even search for that tiny screw at your hand. Now that’s what we call just in time information at your finger tip.

It must be hard to create those kPoint kapsule you ask.. and the answer is a big NO. You can create them as easily as you do a skype call, more over you can use your existing documents (ppt, pdf, images), video clips and desktop screen too. We are not all gifted like Sal Khan, but using kPoint you too can share your knowledge – and it will make you feel like a star when people reach them just in time to solve their problems.
Pretty cool – huh?

But there is a difference – such training videos are long (usually 1 hour or more) and show only the speaker for a majority of the duration.  This brings the problem of searching for relevant content in that long video.  Consider a captured training video about “writing good official emails”.  An employee wants to refer to a particular portion of the talk when the speaker illustrated different ways of salutation and recommended ways of beginning official emails.  She knows that the speaker talked about it in the program – but to find it in the video is a big hassle.   She has to seek back and forth – keep guessing – and try to remember where the speaker talked about the stuff she wants.

kPoint recognizes this problem and overcomes it by indexing as much textual information as possible.  One of the key differentiators of kPoint is capturing presentation slides independently of the video.  kPoint extracts text from the slides and time-indexes it in the kapsule.  kPoint kapsules encourage quick and easy addition of bookmarks to make note of interesting points in the video.  Viewers can also ask questions about specific portions in the talk and these are also time-indexed.  The result is indeed valuable – no longer is it just an opaque hour long static video – it has been transformed into an interactive, searchable training module.  The employee in the above example could search for the keyword “salutation” and kPoint would instantly take her to the exact point in the kapsule where the speaker talks about it.

In addition, kPoint also allows adding transcript to the kapsule which are seen subtitles overlaid on the kapsule.  Needless to say, these are also exploited in search. We are also actively looking at ways to automatically transcribe the speech in a kapsule so that your content becomes more and more accessible to you.

Happy searching!

This release boasts of improved performance, enhanced user experience and seamless enterprise integration. We have added support for SCORM 1.2 so you can use kPoint with your
favorite LMS.  kPoint is now supported on MS, Apple, and Linux OS’s.

kPoint now runs on a 64bit cloud cluster.  You will notice that when the kapsules stream faster and you hold webinars running in to hundreds of participants.

So, what’s the direction kPoint is evolving in?  Our customers today use it for engaging and supporting their customers, employees, and prospects.  We are learning from how they use kPoint.
There is one key to kPoint’s success so far: it reduces the time to information when it is needed the most.  We are making it easier and easier to capture information in kPoint and are
developing newer ways of keeping it fresh with every release.

Check out this new release (visit demos.kpoint.in for a free trial) today and tell us us how you like it.