Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Hi all, tonight I thought I would reflect a bit on the philosophy of the company. I was fortunate enough to receive the text from Steve Job's commencement speech at Stanford for last years graduating class. He emphasized how important it is to do what you love, and to never compromise on that. That seems pretty obvious these days, but what I really liked is how he explained why we need to do it.

Its been almost 3 years since I first decided that I wanted to start a company. I've worked countless late nights, given up weekends, winter and spring breaks, not to mention a lot of my savings, to try build something I could be proud of. There have been times where I seriously thought about quitting, and I was damn close, but what always stopped me was that little voice in my head telling me to keep going a little further, never have any regrets. I'm either going crazy (I hope not, I'm too young!), or I made the right choice. Looking back, I'm glad I made the choice to continue.

Mr. Jobs talked about a publication called "The Whole Earth Catalogue" that he subscribed to. He explained:

"When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry"

I can really identify with the quote, "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish". I think it best sums up our hopes and drive for E-Office Hours. Dare to dream (stay foolish) and always reach for the impossible (stay hungry) has in many ways become our mantra.

Cheers, Dan

Bottoms Up!

In talking to many teachers we are often asked what makes us so much different from our competitors (aside from the great technology and no cost of our products). And the first thing I always mention is our "bottom up" approach. That's usually followed by a blank expression.

So what is the "bottom up" approach? Well to explain it, its best to understand what the "top down" approach is first. In simple terms, its a method employed by all our competitors. A teacher wanting to use their product can only do so once their school (or institution) has adopted it (bought it). So in essence, they receive their marching orders (using the technology) from the top, and are thus at the mercy of their schools administrators, budget surpluses/shortages, etc. So given that, many of our competitors design their products to (1) appeal to the administration, (2) the budget (sometimes), and finally (3) the teacher.

The "bottom up" approach, which we have started to coin, aims to reach the teacher separately from the administration. That is the teacher has direct access and control over the technology they NEED, and don't have to worry about budget shortages, administration changes, etc. Furthermore, it leaves us flexible enough to fill the needs of the administration separate from the teachers.

Let me give you an example. We are working on a product for entire schools right now, it will be subscription based only (very cheap, but not free, sorry folks). Say your school decides to purchase our solution. All your teachers set up VirtualOffice accounts and invest all their time and energy learning the tools and using them. Suddenly a massive budget crisis hits, and the first thing to go is the school wide learning management system purchased from E-Office Hours. With any other tool you would loose the time and effort (not to mention the money) spent in setting up your websites and really using the tool. But with E-Office Hours, you as the teacher would still maintain ultimate control over your classroom website through VirtualOffice. If the next year your school finds that it can afford our learning management system again, it wouldn't affect you, since your free VirtualOffice would have been unaffected. The point is that you as the teacher are always in control, in every sense of the word.

Hope this helps explain a bit more about why we are so unique and why you won't find anything else out there that even comes close to what we're doing.

Cheers, Dan

You Use A Lot AJAX! I Guess You Have a Pretty Dirty Bathroom!

Well the state of my bathroom isn't really up for discussion, but our use of AJAX is! I thought tonight I would take some time to talk about the types of technology we use and why use them from a much less technical perspective, and more from a user experience perspective, and how it impacts you, our users.

If you've heard of AJAX, great! If not, it stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, which probably doesn't mean too much to you. What's important is that its a technology that's been around for over 9 years now, and has recently become very popular due to new programs offered by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. What it does is allows your web applications (Hotmail, Yahoo mail, Google search, etc.) to act more like desktop applications (MS Word, Excel, Outlook, etc.).

Let me give you an example of how we use it. When a student types a question in the Virtual TA question box, we use AJAX to try auto complete their question, which saves them typing time and does a behind the scenes search for matching questions without having to submit their question, which will save teachers time.

We also use drag and drop technology which helps you perform simple tasks much easier. For example, say you've created a lot of custom web pages and you want re-order them in your navigation menu. We allow you to click the pages and drag them to where you want them to be. This saves you time, and makes the interface more intuitive.

Our general philosophy is that life is complicated enough, so why should your software be?! Everything you need to do with our software can be done in one step with very few fields to fill in. For example, creating a custom web page is done in one step, filling in 3 fields. Adding student accounts is done in one step, filling in 2 fields, etc. Keep it simple, but effective.

So that said, if you ever find that something is really confusing, let us know! So far we've had some really great feedback, and a lot of our users have said that the interface is really easy to use, and hopefully now you have some idea of why!

Cheers, Dan

Thank You Intel!

I wanted to share a great article from CNN about Intel's new initiative to promote the web in developing countries. Over the next 5 years they plan to spend one billion dollars to promote the web and train 10 million teachers to use technology in education (See Article Here).

This really seems to bring home the point that technology is becoming a more integral part of education. Furthermore, it stresses the need not only for free technology, but powerful technology. I also recently read an article about a project at MIT to produce cheap laptops to be made available to third world countries that would essentially be glorified web browsers.

The promise of the Internet is finally coming to fruition, where free services empower everyone to better their lives, and it seems that corporate America is also catching on. We are seeing that with many Google and Yahoo products, social networks like MySpace and The Facebook, and even email programs like Hotmail. The point is that you can connect to people all over the world essentially for nothing, and leverage those connections to enrich your life both socially and professionally. So naturally this makes us at E-Office Hours even more eager and inspired to get our message out there that we plan on being a big part of this movement of free technology to the masses, and will continue to expand our products and product offerings to meet the needs of teachers and students everywhere. I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again: You, our users and partners, are our best advocates, so if you like what were doing, continue to spread the word!!

Cheers, Dan

Pop Quiz!

I thought I'd take a moment to talk about one of the new features we are cooking up for VirtualOffice 2.4. One of our major goals during the development of all our products has been to match our competitors (open source and commercial) feature for feature in addition to developing some more cutting edge features not available anywhere else (i.e. the Virtual TA, FAQs, and the concept of an adaptive knowledgebase). Obviously we offer it for free, and make the interface as simple and user friendly as possible. We like to think that we're the best of all worlds, because we are!

To achieve that goal, we are working on a new tool to let teachers easily build quizzes for their students. The goal is to make a very simple interface that lets you add a question, choose what kind of question you want it to be (multiple choice, fill in the blank, etc.), and select whether you want it timed or not. Also, we want to let you do all this from one page and make it feel like you're writing it down on a piece of paper. To achieve this, we are employing some new cutting edge tricks we promise you won't find anywhere else. So if we have a quiz tool, you're probably wondering about a grade book. Don't worry, we're on it :) Its in the works, but might not make VirtualOffice 2.4, but will definitely be there soon.

In addition to the quiz tool, we are working on another new product, so please be patient as we work on the next release of VirtualOffice 2.4 and our next product.

Cheers, Dan

What's In A Name?

So we often get asked where our name comes from? I thought I would take a couple of minutes to address that. So the original idea centered around the office hours experience, which in my personal experience was one of the richest learning environments available to a student. It was the time when I could get all my questions asked and answered, talk to students about forming study groups, pick up my exams and homeworks, go over questions I missed or didn't understand, and much much more. A lot of the interactions that occur between students and teachers during office hours are usually very natural and spontaneous, and are hard to reproduce.

So the goal in forming E-Office Hours was to mimic and adapt that office hours experience for web, capturing that spontaneity in a meaningful way that students could use in a meaningful way. Hence office hours online, or E-Office Hours. That, and www.eofficehours.com wasn't taken yet! I hope that helps :)

Cheers, Dan

New Release!

After a weekend of acceptance testing and a couple of tweaks, I'm happy to announce the release of ParentLink 1.0 and VirtualOffice 2.3.1. As I mentioned before, ParentLink will allow parents to take a more active role in their student's education by seeing first hand what the student sees in their course websites. Furthermore, it will enable the parent to communicate directly with their student's teacher's using our built in messaging system.

VirtualOffice 2.3.1 includes several bug fixes, some performance enhancements, and for the first time, the ability to choose between 2 styles of websites! This new feature allows user's to choose a website style in addition to a color, giving them a total of 22 options. The new style is more polished, has fewer sharp lines, and gives teachers two very distinct choices. We will be adding more styles in future releases, further enabling teachers to make their websites more unique. We decided to label this release of VirtualOffice 2.3.1 instead of 2.4 since no real new functionality was introduced, but rather improved functionality to existing features and a lot of speed and performance tuning. VirtualOffice 2.4 is currently being worked on and will include some cool new features! We are also hard at work on HomeRoom 1.2 and we've even started planning out ParentLink 1.1! If that's not enough, we are currently working on 2 more stealth projects and are beginning planning on yet another 2. As always, stay tuned!

Cheers, Dan