Gareth Jones

After a great response to Learnalot’s first ever competition to win a year’s free subscription, we were all agreed that Bohunt School in Hampshire provided the most imaginative entry and so were awarded the prize.

Congratulations to them and a big thank you to everyone else who entered!

With the excitement building as we head towards Learnalot’s launch in January, we’ve decided to give one lucky school a full year’s subscription for free.

To be in with a chance of winning, all you have to do is explain in 50 words why your school deserves a free subscription and send it to competition@learnalot.com before January 1st 2011. More details are on the email flyer that was sent out last night.

Good luck!

Tonight we’ve unveiled the Learnalot portal and opened the discussion forum for registrations.

The portal isn’t yet taking subscribers as there’s still some work to do on the resources themselves, but with the portal now completed it made sense to unveil it for three important reasons:

1. It gives people who are interested in what we’re doing (and Google Analytics shows there’s a fair few of you out there!) an opportunity to take a look and to get excited about what’s coming.
2. It allows people to register for the newsletter and be kept up to date with resource progress and more importantly, the portal’s launch.
3. Finally, it allows the search engines to start indexing the site so that when we do launch, potential users will be able to find us.

Registrations on the forums are welcome to all those who are interested in the portal or who wish to ask questions or provide feedback. Naturally, the portal will also serve as a support forum when we launch.

Having already convinced four family members to sign up to one of the offers that Vodafone’s UK Deals Team is offering, I’ve decided to write about them on my blog so that even more people can take advantage of what they have to offer.

I got the HTC Desire with 300 minutes, 3000 texts and 500mb data on a 24-month contract for just £20/month with the phone itself costing me £55.

If you look at what the competition is offering, the same deal would cost £30/month at the Carphone Warehouse (although the phone would have been free), which over 24 months means that I’d have paid £185 more overall – including the cost of the phone.

It’s a similar story at Phones4U where the same deal again costs £30/month although the duration of the contract is lower. However, all is not as it seems. While Phones4U would claim that an 18-month contract is better than a 24-month alternative, in this case it simply isn’t. Allow me to demonstrate:

£30/month for 18 months and a free HTC Desire = £540
£20/month for 24 months and an HTC Desire for £55 = £535

At first glance Phones4U looks only slightly more expensive here, and if you speak to them on the phone they make a big deal about it “only” being an 18 month contract. However, for that you’re actually getting 6 months less service, and to have a working phone for the same length of time you’d need to extend the contract by another 6 months which would cost an additional £180 which brings it up to the same cost as the Carphone Warehouse. No-one only needs a phone for 18 months, and that’s what they’re relying on here to make their deal look more attractive. It doesn’t take much to see through their false logic though.

You could argue that with Phones4U you’d be getting your upgrade 6 months earlier than you would with Vodafone, but the £185 more that you’d be paying for a phone that works for 24 months would cover the price of an upgrade from Vodafone (for a similar phone) over 3 times over.

Vodafone’s UK Deals Team is also offering the HTC Legend on a similar contract for just £15/month (which is the one my father and two of my sisters have taken) and they have lots of other deals for different manufacturers as well.

We’ve put together a behind the scenes blog for Learnalot at http://blog.learnalot.co.uk, on which we’ll be posting related news, announcements and resource previews on a pretty regular basis.

The blog has only just been set up, but we’ll be adding content to it regularly so should have some interesting content on there soon.

We’ve also set up a Facebook page and a Twitter account to make it easier for people to discuss the portal, its resources and to contribute their ideas both while the service is in development and when it goes live.

Although it’s no secret that Amayeta and MDM are both owned by Jaspal Sohal (aka Gambini), I had until recently believed that Amayeta’s customer support was better than MDM’s. It wasn’t so much that Amayeta’s was especially good – after all, as I mentioned in the SWF Encrypt review their software is so simple that there isn’t really much that can go wrong (and yet the review still referenced a critical bug and two annoyances), but compared to the trainwreck that is MDM’s customer support, it had to be better. Right?

Jay Charles, a programmer from Virginia in the US doesn’t think so.

He bought and paid for Amayeta’s SWF Encrypt and was taken to a download page that didn’t work. His emails to customer support went unanswered, so he posted on the MDM support forums instead where he did get a reply – and was told to email support! A full six days later – after several progressively angry messages, he finally got his software.

A copy of the discussion has been saved here, just in case Jaspal goes on another thread-deletion spree. Please note that I have altered the image to take out my new username (my original account was banned for pointing out problems with MDM’s Zinc software), but everything else is 100% genuine.

DCOMsoft have very kindly offered a free copy of the SWF Protector 2 software that I reviewed earlier today, to be given to the winner of some kind of competition. I’ve never held a competition on my blog before, so bear with me on this one. Ok, so…

The word “obfuscate”, as defined by Chambers Free English Dictionary, is:

1 to darken or obscure something.
2 to obscure something or make it difficult to understand.
3 to bewilder or confuse someone.

So, keeping with the theme, what’s the most bewildering or confusing thing that’s ever happened to you, or that you have ever inflicted on someone else? It can be on any subject – doesn’t need to be related to writing code or anything like that – and be no more than 500 words. It’s not an easy task, but then this prize is worth £40 so I don’t think I’m asking too much of you!

The best (most interesting or amusing) account by 12pm GMT on Monday the 12th of April gets a free copy of SWF Protector 2.

My girlfriend will be the judge, so you can be assured that the results will be totally fair and impartial. The judge’s decision is final and there are no cash alternatives to the prize. The winner will be announced right here.

The online guitar tutoring website, Jamplay, asked us to develop a custom version of Name that Note:PRE to fit in with the scoring structure and look of their existing games.

The whole process took just under two weeks from initial discussions to delivery, with lots of play-testing and adjusting in-between to get the optimum experience.

Head over to the game page at Quak Multimedia for more information.

It’s here at last -  Mercury 1.0 launched today!

For more information either check out the launch post at Quak Multimedia or check the Mercury website directly, where there is even a demo of the software showcasing some of its capabilities.

Mercury is viewed as a live product that will evolve and adapt over time with the needs of our clients, so this won’t be the last time I mention Mercury on this blog I’m afraid!

As well as the software itself, we’ll also be offering a development service where we will either help clients develop their eLearning or develop it all ourselves for an extremely competitive rate.

Any questions? Feel free to ask.

Quak Multimedia will, very shortly, unveil a rapid eLearning creation tool called Mercury.

Mercury is a Flash application that builds rich eLearning from simple XML instructions. Everything about the eLearning can be defined quickly and easily, including the resource’s language(s), navigation layout, number of pages, content structure, sessions, activities, assessments, videos, photos, audio, animations and text.

Course material can be presented in an almost infinite number of ways, with total control over the look and feel and the ability to select from a wide range of options when it comes to functionality – all without typing a single line of code. In fact, you don’t even need to own Flash to make a resource in Mercury.

The product will be launched initially with two pricing options – one for a single use license and one for unlimited use. Further options may be possible at a later time depending on feedback.

I’ll post an update when the site is live, but any enquiries before that time are welcome.