1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2013: Insane Logic, United Kingdom

The educational technology sector, or “edutech,” is seeing both advances in and greater attention to niche markets. The growing integration of technology into people’s daily lives has provided a great opportunity for better learning and developmental apps. One such product comes from Zoe Peden, a co-founder of Insane Logic, a 1M/1M premium member company. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Bobby Yazdani, Founder and CEO of SABA (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: These changes will have to be integrated. Let me tell you how we have designed a product or an environment in which we run our virtual incubator. It is not a simple design. We have video lectures and case studies. The video lectures are recorded videos. Then we have case studies that go with each of those videos that are in searchable text format. It is then all organized in metadata and authored, so you can a very efficient 50-hour core curriculum of all the things you need to learn if you go through those core modules. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Bobby Yazdani, Founder and CEO of SABA (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That is where the question I am asking stems from. There are a lot of these massive open online courses available from various brand-name universities, or online programs that are now becoming available. From an enterprise learning point of view, the strategy so far has been just to learn content or send employees to learn specific enterprise learning content from specific providers. What happens when you inject vast masses of material that is out there free? Is the model simply going to become that the enterprises simply curate what is out there and create links to these e-learning plans? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Bobby Yazdani, Founder and CEO of SABA (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If you are trying to get a European sales team to bond around a sales training module and enhance that module with their own live learning and web conferences, that requires a level of moderation. Somebody needs to orchestrate that behavior. It is not clear to me from an organizational adoption point of view whether these moderators already exist in organizations as formal roles.

Bobby Yazdani: For that reason we need catalysts and advocates to fuel these communities in many regards. We have a set of servicers and “best practice”-rs whom we train and offer to our customers. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Bobby Yazdani, Founder and CEO of SABA (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How are you capturing this social learning, and more important, how are your customers doing it using your system?

Bobby Yazdani: There are multiple abstractions built in to the product. People can organize into groups around initiatives, ideas, products, geographies, business processes, and many other elements. We would allow for these groups to range from small to very large, where people can get organized in terms of policies and rules of collaborating in a social aspect. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Bobby Yazdani, Founder and CEO of SABA (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I think that is a reasonable point to underscore.

Bobby Yazdani: There are a couple of other important points. The sessions, where the content is being delivered, would have to manage the same amount of data from users and learners. Whether you are on a smartphone, on a desktop or in a classroom, your profile would have to be adequately managed in real time. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Bobby Yazdani, Founder and CEO of SABA (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: That is an evolution I would say almost all enterprise software companies have gone through in the last decade.

Bobby Yazdani: That is right. But with that evolution came an operational model, retraining our enablement of our own organization to support a very different business model. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Bobby Yazdani, Founder and CEO of SABA (Part 1)

Bobby Yazdani is the chief executive officer of SABA, one of the industry’s leading learning and talent management providers. Bobby holds a BA in applied mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1997 Bobby founded SABA, and he took the company public in 2000. Today the company has revenue of more than $100 million. In this interview Bobby talks about different ways of learning through mobile and social platforms and the adoption of his technology in enterprises today. Further, he shares insights into what he believes the future of education will look like.

Sramana Mitra: Bobby, let’s start with some context about SABA. I have been following the company for many years, so this would be an opportunity to introduce the company to the audience as well as bring me up to speed about your evolution.

Bobby Yazdani: A number of colleagues and I founded the company back in 1997. The core catalyst behind the company and our products was the introduction of the Internet and the subsequent shift of many enterprise business processes to the Internet. >>>