After I joined the faculty at Auburn in 1991, two students began a dot.com startup and convinced me to lend them a small seed loan. Before long, they had given up and I was left to deliver. I pivoted and it became a niche eLearning development company.
For a decade iPOV relied on work by part-time Auburn students. They so consistently exceeded expectations that most ended up in great jobs after graduation. Many of them credited the opportunities and mentoring they received at iPOV. From this experience, I evangelized for the concept..… more
iPOV made so many technical manuals (about 500 projects all told) that we became very methodical about their structure. I crafted a 2 page model that guided the structure of almost all of our materials. It was very versatile and seldom let us down.
iPOV developed a workflow for eLearning production that cut conventional development time and cost by at least 75%. It remained iPOV’s hallmark for nearly 20 years. I still use it today for my personal work.
The idea of a “material master” is central to the design of every major class of transaction management software: CRM, ERP, WMS, Payables, etc. Like AC motors, however, it is usually perceived as a mystery that most employees don’t want to try to understand. iPOV..… more
iPOV took Flash to its logical conclusion by creating a web video player that could be actively reprogrammed on the fly. We used it a lot ourselves, but we never really got traction trying to offer it to others. Poor marketing was a big part..… more
iPOV didn’t invent this … Adobe did. However, iPOV pushed the idea hard and developed some software tools to make it faster and easier to author PDFs that contained embedded video. Originally, we used Flash video. Later, we did the same thing with mp4.
One of iPOV’s secret weapons was a system of simple design patterns for eLearning. They were not so much designed to look good … although they could. They were designed to make it easy and foolproof to build material that was clear and accurate. We..… more
Steve Jobs might as well have blown up iPOV’s offices. He announced that Flash would not be allowed on the iPAD and all of our corporate customers started to demand we deliver materials without Flash. We had a ton of features that could not be..… more
The financial crash hit our big corporate customers hard … and iPOV was all but wiped out. We survived for a while, but debts crippled us until my wife and I paid them off a decade later.
iPOV developed a “youtube clone” based on open source software. It was designed to make searching video much easier and faster … easier even than Youtube. It worked, and we used it extensively in our projects, but the death of Flash killed it too …..… more
iPOV’s love affair with Flash hit a peak when we were asked to propose a system to Amgen. They didn’t buy it, but the design was awesome … and we had all the pieces already working. The system would have interactively edited video snippets into..… more
AC Motors are incredibly common and important. They are also amazingly simple and elegant, thanks to Nicola Tesla. However, it is no easy chore to explain them to non-engineers. I tried this for Siemens and I think I came pretty close to nailing it. This..… more