Take part in the public’s first glimpse of Bravais [brav-ey]; Xyleme’s new cloud learning solution that allows you to quickly deliver personalized learning applications.

This is a rare opportunity to attend a live webinar with Xyleme’s President & CEO, Mark Hellinger. He will be your guide as you explore everything Bravais.

Along your journey you will find out how Bravais can revolutionize the way your learners access and interact with your learning content by:

• Delivering learning anywhere, anytime, on any device
• Allowing content to be accessed within your learners favorite media channels like, Linkedin, Facebook, and Google+
• Liberating content from your learning management systems to create personalized learning experiences
• Tracking how users consume and interact with your learning content
• And more!

Reserve your spot now – before it’s too late!
 Tuesday February 7, 2012 @ 11:30 MST

What is Bravais?
Bravais is your cloud of learning content upon which you can quickly build personalized learning applications, connecting your students, employees and customers to the content they need, using the apps they prefer, on the devices they choose. Read more…

The Pastiche iPad app version 1.4 is out! You can now download it from the App Store.

This new version comes with support for glossary. So now when you open a course from the Bookshelf you can access the glossary for that course through a button on the bottom bar. Keeping true to our flexible model, publishers can decide whether they want to have a glossary or not when they create a course for Pastiche. The feature will automatically be enabled or disabled by the app for each particular course.

To navigate through the glossary users swipe a finger vertically on the screen or use the top bar letter index for quicker access to a section. Clicking on a term will reveal its definition.

Publishers can now group the lessons of a course within modules, offering learners a more convenient navigation through the content when courses are long.

On top of the glossary and module feature, we have updated the look and feel of the questions in the Quiz Me section in our demo app. The new design is cleaner and more user friendly. In any case, publishers have total control over this and can define their own look and feel.

Big announcements are coming with the next version of Pastiche that will be available in 7 weeks, so stay tuned.

You have probably heard the (rather exciting) news of Xyleme’s new “iPad app that creates apps” - Pastiche™.  We believe that it’s a revolutionary product that will change the way organizations define blended learning and we’re proud of our continued work on its development. We will try to keep release cycles for the Pastiche™ app short and agile with new versions to be released every 5-8 weeks and numbered with even numbers as follows: v 1.0, v1.2, v1.4 etc.

Keeping true to that process we just released a new version to the App Store last week.  Based on early user feedback we decided to release Pastiche v1.2, a slightly modified version with two major user interface features. This release also includes a few minor design improvements.

Here are the latest feature updates:

Finger Swipe

The first major feature we have introduced in this new version is the ability to turn pages back and forth using the finger swipe gesture. This significantly improves the user experience and makes the environment much more comfortable for learners and iPad users.

Pinch-to-Zoom

The other major feature that is also part of this release is the ability to zoom content in the Read Me and Show Me sections. To zoom in and out the learner uses the pinch gesture to increase or decrease the size of the content in the screen. All the content will be zoomed, including text, video and images. We see this being particularly helpful when looking at figures that contain so much detail that one needs to be zoomed in order to see all the information.

Stay tuned for more news on Pastiche™ development and plans!

Congratulations to all of those nominated. It’s an impressive list of bloggers, Tweeters (is that a word?) and other social media leaders who I plan to now read regularly and follow if I’m not already.

This year, our educational podcast library Xyleme Voices was nominated and shortlisted in the category of Best Educational Use of Audio. I’m very honored and thrilled and if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to give a shout-out to our spectacular team here at Xyleme. While I am the host of this library, there are a number of people in the background who put tremendous time, effort, and pride into researching, recruiting, and producing these terrific podcasts.

And of course, what would our podcast series be without our outstanding participants who take the time not only to be interviewed, but always come incredibly prepared. They all understand the impact of these podcasts, and no one takes them lightly. And admittedly, even after more than a year of doing these interviews, I am still incredibly nervous before each podcast.

So, I’d like to close this post by saying a few words about my experience with each of our participants thus far:

Bryan Chapman: I never get tired of working with Bryan. In addition to being incredibly likable, he has this uncanny ability to take complex topics and present them in an understandable and enjoyable way.

Janet Clarey: Smart, insightful, and a great presenter with razor sharp wit. Janet is a true champion for others in the industry and someone I aspire to be more like.

Ruth Clark: Gracious and wonderful to work with. Never underestimate this legend’s power. Within an hour of posting her podcast, she had hundreds of downloads. Even after a year, it’s still being downloaded.

Jay Cross: Has a great perspective on all subjects learning and is a true champion of the training organization. Today, training is undervalued and Jay’s goal is to ensure CLO’s take their true spot in the C-suite – at the top.

Conrad Gottfredson: A great friend and performance support guru. With the emergence of social media, Conrad’s learning at the moment of need has never had greater significance.

Micheal Hanley: Wonderful advocate for open source technologies. He’s passionate about what he believes in and I had a great time engaging in more than one spirited discussion with him.

Lars Hyland: A great guy and incredibly personable. One of the few vendors who understands the importance of making valuable contributions to the learning community rather than just pushing a corporate message.

Harold Jarche: So intelligent, it’s almost intimidating. Harold is not afraid to challenge conventional wisdom and I still repeatedly refer to his ideas and concepts regarding learning networks.

Charles Jennings: What a thrill is was to interview this real-world CLO. His contributions to social learning in the workplace are second to none.

Ann Kwinn: Ann gave some great tips on the virtual classroom that I still use today.

Elliot Masie: A true showman and it comes through in his podcast. Deeply entrenched with learning executives, Elliot gave great insight into how training operates within blue chip companies.

Frank Nyugen: Let me just say this: there are not many people who can describe reusable learning objects with such clarity and make it so interesting.

Clark Quinn: Clark has a real gift for getting to the heart of the matter in a clear and succinct way and I’ve quoted him on numerous occasions. Also, he’s way too modest about the value he brings to training.

Allison Rossett: I think we can all agree that there is no one quite like Allison – smart, funny, and right on the money. I enjoyed our discussion – even when she let her cat join in on the conversation.

Clive Shepherd: One of my favorite podcasts because Clive makes you think hard about the things you take for granted and shows you that there is still massive room for improvement.

Ellen Wagner: Instructional designer extraordinaire! She gets it and taught me a lot about how to create an experience in learning. A great contact that I am grateful to have.

Thank you all and looking forward to another great year of podcasts at Xyleme Voices.

As an LCMS based on a native XML platform, Xyleme has had minimal work to deliver our content to this new standard and platform. We have now a standard capability for e-Book output that can be used just like of our other multi-channel publishing options. We use the same publishing infrastructure, transformation tools and application functionality for the development of e-Books as we do for our other outputs. We don’t have to develop a new way to handle e-Books in our application workflow, it’s simply another output. This is where the fundamental question of XML as the native storage format comes into play. With XML it’s easy. With a proprietary system, it requires a lot more effort to develop and integrate seamlessly into the existing workflow. Both short-term and long-term, XML content storage makes it easier. And now you can download your Xyleme LCMS User Guide to your e-Book