That seems to have continued post-exit, for today the pair are announcing Booster Seat 2011, a program whereby a Kiwi startup can spend a month in San Francisco, gratis. The package that Nicole and Rich are giving away includes;

• Return flights for 2 people to San Francisco
• Accommodation in San Francisco for 30 days
• Up to 2 desks at the new kiwi working space “The Landing Pad” to work from

There’s no strings attached, companies need only contact the pair and explain why the trip would be useful to them. Nicole and Rich (with some help from IceHouse CEO Andy Hamilton) will judge who they deem to be most worthy and that’s it – the winner will be on the way to the Bay Area.

Spending as much time as I do in the US I get a real awareness of just how much difference US exposure can make to a business. On behalf of the Kiwi tech community I’d like to tip my hat in the direction of Nicole and Rich for setting up this initiative. You guys rock!

Recently a couple of announcements caught my eye that really speak to our contention that Cloud Computing democratizes IT. As we said in a previous CloudU report, Cloud Computing is facilitating a seismic shift in terms of business development. Formerly, entrepreneurs who wished to start a business had to invest significant capital into hardware and software licenses. Even the simplest of businesses required expensive software licenses, a server or two and the associated administration cost of keeping it all running. The availability of Cloud Computing solutions has led to a massive shift in the availability of computing power.

A couple of cases in point… a little while ago I was excited by some of my friends who started up a great little Learning Management System, Litmos. I’ve known the Litmos crew for a few years, and actually reviewed their offering nearly three years ago. Recently they announced that they were being acquired by the massive software company Callidus. It seems to me that this is really democratization in action. From a small island nation in the South pacific, with very little capital and only a few staff, Litmos where able to build up a business that, in short space of time, would be a target for acquisition.

Litmos did this by using democratized technology – from economical internal development tools, to cloud storage, from web based email platforms to SaaS accounting. While it is impossible to argue that startups didn’t grow before the advent of the Cloud, I believe that Cloud has enabled these startups to grow more quickly, more easily and more flexibly than before. A recent study of the services that Y Combinator (a large technology incubator in the US) startups use reveals that, indeed, startups are embracing the cloud over and above running technology in house.

And to continue on about that theme of democratization, here’s another example. Recently Intuit announced the launch of Intuit Anywhere which allows third party applications to integrate with the US’s most well known SMB accounting software, QuickBooks. In the past, a software developer that wanted to build an add-on solution for an accounting application would not only have had to invest in software and hardware of heir own, but they would have had to jump through a huge number of metaphorical hoops to get it built. Today however, in the democratized industry we work in, developers have the ability to use plug and play tools, and are enjoying the fact that vendors are more keen than ever to let data flow freely.

Now of course these two examples aren’t solely caused by Cloud Computing – Open Source software, the rise of social media and changes in the economy also play their part. But I’ll go out on a limb and say that from the technology perspective, it’s Cloud Computing that enables many of these changes to occur. Justification for our contention that Cloud Computing is a revolution rather than simply evolution.

Oh and we’d love you to join in some of our webinars or read the whitepapers – the CloudU homepage is here - and you can register to have updates sent to your inbox (in a non-spammy way of course!) there as well.

Callidus software announced this morning that it has acquired Litmos in a transaction with (as usual) no public details. I only know of the acquisition through some sleuthing of share transfers this week. Funnily enough I wrote about Callidus a couple of years ago, when they announced an intention to move their entire product suite to SaaS delivery.

Callidus is a Sales performance Management (SPM) provider that has a host of modules from external facing ones (onboarding, channel management) to more inwards facing tools (reporting & analytics, sales communications). Litmos is actually a pretty good fit with their suite, as it allows Callidus to build an end to end suite of sales tools that not only help deliver sales activities, but manage the lifecycle and development of sales staff.

Litmos was a four years young company, founded and run by a small team in Auckland, New Zealand. Despite being a small team of three, Litmos has some high profile customers including Eloqua, Saasu, BOSCO and BeatMedical. No detail about what the acquisition means for these existing customers was at hand – here’s hoping that Callidus commits to supporting existing customers using Litmos as a standalone product and doesn’t try and force people into using more of their core tools.

Either way – congratulations to Rich, Daniel and Nicole on their exit. Onto the next one now guys!

It seems like everything gets the 2.0 moniker these days. From accounting 2.0 to Web 2.0 to office productivity 2.0, it’s a veritable second coming. Another 2.0 title joins the fray in the form of training 2.0.

Litmos in an on-demand training delivery offering that aims to make it easy to both create online training courses but also to deliver them and track the progress of trainees. In a constrained economy good training is an important tool to both building productivity and often to retaining staff – it is towards easing the training hurdle that Litmos’ offering is directed.

Training course creation

Litmos has several ways to build training courses. First course creators can upload existing presentation, Litmos supports the major presentation formats (.ppt, .odp and .pdf). Once core materials are uploaded, course administrators can build complete training courses using the online editor which supports video and audio files, allowing for the creation of media rich and attention retaining training courses.

No training course is complete without assessment and Litmos allows for a range of assessment options including multi-choice, keyword, and essay style questions to test trainees’ understanding of the course content.

Training course delivery

Of course there is little point in creating a SaaS tool and the expecting users to revert to traditional method to delivery its output. Litmos also includes a delivery offering. Trainees see their own personalised screen which shows both training to complete and already completed training

Administrators can choose which parts of the training course are delivered to which trainees. As the trainees start completing course work Litmos provides reports based on several metrics, time taken, number of attempts, score and completion or otherwise.

Summary

Distance learning is a big market and as companies respond to a tight labour market and uncertain times by looking further afield for employees, distance learning will grow in importance. Litmos looks like a good offering, I like the way it creates a friendly opportunity for trainers to create nicely presented training materials.

It does however seem to be a fairly static offering, there is not yet any real ability for trainees and trainers to communicate via the training material. It would be nice to see an online meeting type window were trainers and trainees could talk/IM/email. Similarly the reporting functions could have ability to push out real time alerts to trainers.

The Litmos crew tells me that this sort of functionality is on the cards – it’ll be good to see them roll it out – as it stand Litmos is a solid offering but nothing that one couldn’t replicate in other, non specialist offerings – more training-centric functionality will help them carve their own niche.