(Comic via Matt Forcum)

By looking at Kickstarter stats, you might think that mobile projects would not do so well on one of the largest funding platforms for creative projects in the world.

The technology category is one of the least successful project categories (33.39 percent), falling only behind publishing (31.12 percent) and fashion (27.45 percent). However, despite its relatively low success rate, technology projects raise an incredible amount of money. Of the projects that have been funded, four have received $1 million or more, second only to games, which has had 12 projects reach that threshold.

We examined four mobile projects in an effort to compare them to the stats. In our nonscientific sample, these projects should all be considered wild successes. Not just because all four have reached or will reach financial success. Not just because two of these will raise more than $1 million. But because of how much they exceeded their goals.

Monkey Kit is a flexible positioning system for an iPad or other tablet or e-reader that has raised three times its goal. WakaWaka Power, a personal power station for your mobile device, has raised nearly 10 times more than the original goal.

Now to the million-dollar projects.

After setting a $100,000 goal, LIFX raised $1.3 million in less than two months. LIFX is an LED light bulb that changes color just by tapping your iOS or Android device.

Finally, there’s Pebble. In four months, the watch that syncs with your iPhone or Android phone raised $10 million from nearly 70,000 backers. If you wear a watch, take three minutes to watch that video and tell me you wouldn’t have given $5 to that effort.

LIFX and Pebble, especially, may be contributing to a new trend. According to Mashable, “some startups and even larger companies are now looking to crowdfunding sites to serve other business functions, from market research and product design to customer relations and manufacturing negotiations.”

In the comments below, share with us the mobile projects you’ve contributed to on Kickstarter or another crowdfunding platform. What were the results like? What do you wish would have been different? Let us know about your experiences.

Editor’s note: Interestingly enough, Kickstarter just this week released its first iOS app. 

Two of Float Mobile Learning’s apps were mentioned in a recent Forbes article highlighting 10 apps to make your business more productive in 2013. Specifically, Forbes contributor David K. Williams called out RabbleBrowser and Tappestry.

RabbleBrowser is a collaborative Web browser for the iPad, available for $2.99 and eligible for volume purchasing and educational discounts. RabbleBrowser lets users connect to a browsing session on the same Wi-Fi or Bluetooth network in order to view and share content like Web sites, PDFs and more, including Dropbox files. The app is available in five languages – English, Japanese, French, Spanish and Italian.

Tappestry is the enterprise social network for learning. Multiple sources point to research that suggests as much as 90 percent of what we learn has been learned informally through our peers, colleagues and mentors. Built on the Tin Can API, Tappestry is a way to capture that information. Tappestry is available for free on iOS, Android and the Web. Enterprises have a number of customized options available, and those interested can sign up for a free trial.

Learning is everywhere. People learn by watching and doing. We do this every day and may not even realize this. The 70-20-10 rule may not be provable, but it’s certainly palpable. It just feels right. It makes sense.

I realized this some time ago in observing how my children learned various skills and behaviors. They learn best by observing and then praticing (Do as I say, not as I do, right?). As I was sharing a favorite movie of mine, Disney’s 1982 sci-fi film, Tron, with my oldest boy (We like watching sci-fi and superhero flicks together), I was also reminded of this by a memorable scene from the film. The chief enforcer of the villainous Master Control Program (MCP), Sark, is instructing some new conscripts on their upcoming roles and responsibilities…

Greetings. The Master Control Program has chosen you to serve your system on the Game Grid. Those of you who continue to profess a belief in the Users will receive the standard substandard training, which will result in your eventual elimination. Those of you who renounce this superstitious and hysterical belief will be eligible to join the warrior elite of the MCP. You will each receive an identity disc.

[Sark displays his own disc to the crowd]

Don’t Lose This.

Everything you do or learn will be imprinted on this disc. If you lose your disc, or fail to follow commands, you will be subject to immediate deresolution. That will be all.

Now, in the real world, failure to follow commands won’t result in deresolution (a pixelly, computerized form of death for characters in The Game Grid), but it certainly can result in you not being able to advance your career or even your eventual termination from a position.

A key difference in the approach taken by screenwriter Steven Lisberger and the way that the real world works is that you have no identity disk. In a sense, you have documents that may perhaps “prove” who you are and what you know (your ID, SSN, your college degree[s] and resume), but there is little to no way to both verify that information and “Everything you do or learn” are truthful and have occurred. What have you learned “program?” How do you prove that to others? How do you take that verification with you when you change jobs or re-enroll in another educational program to test out of prerequisites?

In short, the answer right now is that you can’t. When you change jobs, you’ll have to take that same Red Cross or Sarbanes-Oxley Act course again. You’ll need to verify that you know how to use an SAP system or Salesforce.com again to your new employer. This is frustrating for both the worker and the employer. The wasted time and effort caused by unneeded training and recertification is done at an incalculable cost.

Not being able to take your credentials and professional experience with you results in a huge challenge in the professional world, where people are regularly changing jobs, and even careers. In addition to this key shortcoming, there is another big gap in the world of skill certification and verification.

Re-training and adult continuing education is a massive area in need of change right now. With the unemployment and underemployment numbers still much higher than we are used to, it’s clear that something has got to give. In some spots there are a glut of workers seeking jobs, and in other markets, there is a dearth of skilled candidates. Reeducation is an expensive proposition for many (even associate’s degrees are not cheap these days), but it is needed in order to move from one line of work to another. You can’t simply walk into an interview and proclaim that that you are qualified or certified for that software job you saw on Monster.com since you’ve gone through 2-3 MOOCs, a curriculum on software development on UDEMY or iTunes U, and completed a bunch of courses at Lynda.com.

But what if you could?

Mind = blown.

It’s clear that with mobile, social, local, and a variety of other educational tools out there now – such as CodeAcademy, Learnist, Khan Academy and a long, long list of other resources – that there have never been more ways to learn in a variety of styles, platforms and timetables. The problem comes in proving to others that you know what you say you do.

Sure, networks like Tappestry exist. CEU credits and certificates can be earned by completing certain workshops and programs. But what about that universal open platform and format that allows you take your learning record, including your certifications, with you as you grow and progress in your personal and professional development endeavors?

The Tin Can API is emerging as an option to track and store, transport and share your learning records. It’s still in its very beginnings, but it can certainly be seen as an attempt to coalesce all the things you learn, do and experience in the real world. The idea is that you learn by doing, and these experiences, no matter how droll or monumental they may be, all combine to create the being that you are. Tin Can echoes Sark’s proclamation: Everything you do or learn will be imprinted on this disc.

These experiences are all well and good, but what about verification? How do these things you say you do get proven? A diploma or master’s degree is verifiable. What about the fact that you say you went through 25 courses on Web design by yourself and say you are capable of handling the job that you are interviewing for?

Enter Open Badges. The Mozilla Foundation’s foray into educational software is an interesting one, to say the least. Part Boy Scout badge, part digital certificate/signature, the Open Badges is an attempt to award a recognition of mastery or skill acquisition and also verify the skill via a third party (e.g., an educational institution or a publisher such as O’Reilly). These badges are earned by completing curriculum, attending workshops, passing assessments, performing tasks or any other sort of benchmarks set forth by the issuing body. It may be easy to initially dismiss these badges as trite examples of gamification gone wild (with all the backlash you would expect). However, with a measured approach, it is easy to see just where something like this could be taken in a positive light as well.

Want to make a career change? Take night classes in a MOOC, pass it and earn badges. Go through an apprenticeship or internship successfully and earn badges. Attach these badges to your resume or CV, and offer a simple verification process to HR professionals and interviewing companies to prove you have the skills to make the cut to the next round of discussions or interviews.

On the other side of the table, consider yourself looking for a vendor that has the skills or certifications you need to complete a job. You can try someone out via a recruiting service or freelance directory and hope they have the chops, or you could look in a directory that shows all certified independent professionals that can do what you need. No real guesswork needed.

It’s clear, thanks to Tin Can and Open Badges, that learning will look very different in the near future. Will you be ready to recognize it? Time to read up and get things moving if you want to be part of this push.

You better recognize!

Happy February! A number of us traveled two weeks ago to beautiful San Jose for ASTD’s TechKnowledge 2013 conference. Many expo attendees dropped by our booth to explain how they are looking to begin integrating mobile learning into their organizations, and we met a few visitors in person for the first time who follow us on Twitter and keep up with our activities. It was great meeting all of you, and we hope you had safe journeys back home after a conference filled with learning.

One of the main concerns we hear from expo attendees at any conference we visit is budgeting difficulties regarding mobile efforts. This anedoctal evidence helps support results of a 2012 survey of business and learning professionals who say budgeting for mobile learning is the chief impediment to adopting it within an organization. As a result, Float senior analyst Dr. Gary Woodill and managing director Chad Udell offer tips for budgeting for mobile and social learning in our latest white paper.

In this newsletter, we’re offering you an excerpt explaining the top three concerns regarding implementing mobile learning, the three prevailing approaches to deploying mobile, and a brief look of the variables you should be thinking about in your organization.

Excerpt: Budgeting for Social Learning and Mobile Learning in a BYOD Environment

A 2012 survey of business and learning professionals found three major issues that have been identified as impediments to mobile learning (ASTD and the Institute for Corporate Productivity, in Sosbe, 2012):

1. Security concerns: 36%
2. Integration with company assets: 37%
3. Budgetary concerns: 46%

Despite all the noise in the literature regarding the first two issues, budgeting is the dominant issue for mobile learning.

To be effective in both social learning and mobile learning endeavors, an organization needs to take an active role to promote, develop, police, and nurture the growth of a learning community that operates within the corporate cultural framework. This will demand planning, pilot programs, change management, implementation and maintenance. As the existing IT infrastructure will account for most of the technology demands, the major budgetary concerns involve people to manage and support this initiative.

As indicated above, an organization can choose three basic approaches to deploying mobile:

1. Corporate-Liable: The organization selects, purchases, and supplies devices (with the software) to their employees.
2. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device): the organization supports employee-owned mobile devices and supplies software when necessary.
3. BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology): The organization allows access to its systems through employee-owned devices. Software choice is left to the discretion, and responsibility, of the employee.

On first glance, it may seem that adopting corporate-liable devices is the most expensive route. Be careful! There are costs to deploying any new system within a corporation, and some of these costs are not immediately apparent.

BYOT is the default strategy for many companies that fail to build a sound mobile device strategy and supporting policy. Employees start by using a myriad of mobile devices and software to access corporate assets. A company may actually choose this route as the cost advantages are clear, but serious disadvantages are also present. BYOT has all of the budgetary issues that are common to BYOD, but they tend to become magnified. Security and interoperability can become serious problems with ballooning costs. Most importantly, BYOT introduces an element of chaos into your IT and accounting framework.

These devices are a new workplace reality. They are going to be present in your company and they will be performing work-related tasks regardless of management decisions. This means that your company has no choice but to try and get some level of control over their use, or surrender to chaos. As BYOD is already a reality in virtually every company, a policy, support system, and budget must be put in place very quickly.

To download the full report on budgeting for mobile learning in a BYOD environment, visit this link.

A Closer Look: The Tin Can API in the Real World

The words “Tin Can,” “Project Tin Can,” “Tin Can API,” and “Experience API” are popping up everywhere these days, whether it’s a Twitter stream, webinar or conference. Yet, as we experienced even at TechKnowledge, a number of learning professionals are having difficulty understanding what the Tin Can API means for their organization.

We wanted to help, so we created an interactive flowchart detailing how an employee (Bob) integrates what he learned in training with what he does in operations. This experience illustrates the interaction of learning and working in a really tangible, understandable way. Learning events and real-world activities can be tracked with the Tin Can API.

In fact, for developers, we’ve even created what the generated experiences would look like with code samples. On top of the narrative in the story itself, the interaction of the cartoon’s viewer (you), is also generating Tin Can events on the SCORM Cloud Public LRS. You can view the statements it is generating here.

To get a better understanding of what the Tin Can (or Experience) API means for the enterprise, visit this link.

Scott McCormick Speaking at Training Conference Feb. 19

Float’s vice president of business development, Scott McCormick, returns to speak at Training Magazine’s 2013 Conference & Expo in Orlando. He will be delivering the Mobile Learning Crash Course, where he’ll share tips on how to successfully launch mobile learning right now.

The mobile learning platform is a tempest of different devices, new design standards, learning strategies, instructional design requirements, and contextual considerations, to name a few. Without experience in these areas, a learning professional can be left scrambling to meet the expectations of their stakeholders and target audience.

Those who attend this session will learn how to form a team and build a process, how to get buy-in from stakeholders, and the challenges involved in interactive and instructional design, plus more.

To register, visit TrainingConference.com.

ASTD Mobile Learning Certificate Series Comes to Alexandria Feb. 28 and March 1

Float’s Scott McCormick and senior developer Dan Pfeiffer will be facilitating the ASTD Mobile Learning Certificate program at ASTD headquarters in Alexandria, Va., on Feb. 28 and March 1.

As Chad Udell mentioned in a recent blog post, the two-day, hands-on workshop features the following information:

• Intro to basic mobile learning concepts
• Creation of a mobile learning strategy
• Instructional design for a mobile learning effort
• Calculating ROI of mobile learning
• Creating mobile learning prototypes

And more!

Sandbox 1.1 Released to App Store

Download your update to Sandbox, our whitelist Web browser for iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad). Sandbox 1.1 now features downloadable, pre-configured files; the ability to set addresses, phone numbers and calendar dates as tappable; and friendly bookmark names (with emojis!).

Sandbox is available in the App Store for $2.99, and is eligible for an educational discount.

Let’s face it. Mobile devices are pretty cool. They can be your personal trainer, your pocket jukebox, your navigator, your conversation partner and your heart rate monitor. You can check and change your home thermostat remotely, video chat with someone across the globe, test your hearing, make a movie, mix an original song and, oh yeah, make phone calls. Why shouldn’t we be enamored by these amazing devices that have become so much a part of our everyday lives? It should be no surprise why they have achieved such universal acceptance in such a short time. They can solve many problems and meet many needs.

But does all this technical wizardry skew our perception of mobile content delivery when it comes to mLearning? It can and it will if you are not careful. It’s very easy to let the technology and the form factors distract you from your actual goals. Here are some points to remember as you embark on your first or any mobile learning implementation. Read more »

A number of media outlets reported earlier this month on Tim Cook’s latest visit to China, the second in 11 months by Apple’s CEO. He previously went in March.

“China is currently our second-largest market,” Cook told the Xinhua News Agency (via the BBC). “I believe it will become our first.”

According to Forbes, Apple sales in China doubled in 2011 from 2010, and the company now has 11 retail outlets within China. What’s also interesting about his recent visits is that Business Insider points out Cook is the first active Apple CEO to visit the contry. Steve Jobs sent Cook as a delegate, writes Dylan Love, “when trouble started brewing with Foxconn.”

With smartphone penetration nearing a saturation point in industrialized nations, one can only guess that Apple needs to expand to China and other developing countries in order to maintain its aggressive quarterly growth.

After working with ASTD in developing and teaching the Mobile Learning Certificate Program for the last several months, the response has been great from the attendees.

Overall, people seem excited to be immersed in the world of mobile learning for a couple days. The reviews from the attendees have been overwhelmingly positive, and it’s reassuring that they are getting a great deal of value out of the program. This is heartening, to say the least.

The value proposition of this training is getting around. In fact, we’ve even delivered the curriculum directly to corporate learning departments. This is a great way to put your entire team through mobile learning bootcamp.

The events and the attendees themselves have equally impressed the Float team. Coming from all sorts of industries and company sizes, it’s clear that they are coming to learn, regardless of their individual situations. Read more »

After having written six research reports on mobile health (or mHealth), and attended two mHealth Summits in Washington, D.C. (see my review of mHealth Summit exhibitors from 2011 to 2012), I thought I was on top of this topic. But, a thin volume of essays and case studies edited by Rick Krohn and David Metcalf, titled mHealth: From Smartphones to Smart Systems, showed me that I have more to learn. This book, published by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in 2012, has plenty of insights for everyone.

The book starts off with a forward by Robert McCray, president and CEO of the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance, who argues that wireless technology can reduce costs, improve healthcare quality, and increase access and transparency. In their introduction to the book, the two editors echo that sentiment, and contrast the experience of introducing useful health technologies like computerized provider order entry (CPOE) and electronic medical records (EMR) with the experience of introducing mobile health. The first experience was characterized by scepticism and tepid growth while, they state, “with amazing speed, mHealth is becoming the clinical data medium of choice for clinicians and consumers, typified by compact devices and tools that are cheap, reliable, persistent and convenient.” They add, “It’s the care management platform that the EMR always should have been, with an important distinction – it’s reaching its potential.” Read more »

A little over a week ago I shared the first five of ten mobile learning resolutions for you to consider in my post,