Colby Devitt is the president and co-founder of Wildform, a multimedia software company based out of Los Angeles, USA. In this conversation, Colby discusses Wildform Online, their new online service that lets you host surveys and quizzes.
Geetesh: Tell us more about Wildform Online, and how it can help users do simple tasks?
Colby: With Wildform Online people can upload their e-learning quizzes, tests, surveys and presentations to the web and track viewership and score results without the expense and labor typically associated with using an LMS (Learning Management System). For as low as $19.99 a month, we host and track how their employees, students, customers and prospects interact with their projects.
For example, if a teacher creates a quiz, she can post it online, invite her students to take the quiz, track the test scores of her students, and if she wants, send them their results. She can choose to publish her quiz for a general audience or restrict it to just her students. Wildform Online also creates detailed reports for her - she can see how many people viewed her quiz, who took it and how they did. Wildform Online is also a great way to conduct surveys and polls - just upload your survey, invite people to take it and view the results. It's also an effective way to host and track the results of interactive presentations and online courses.
Geetesh: How does Wildform Online integrate with other Wildform products?
Colby: Wildform Online works fantastically with our product WildPresenter Pro, which lets you create multimedia presentations, quizzes, tests, surveys, and product demos, as well as converting PowerPoint to Flash, and recording onscreen activity . It is because of WildPresenter's quiz and survey creation capabilities that we built Wildform Online. Many of our customers created quizzes and surveys and then wanted to know how to upload them to the web and track the results from people taking them. What they were asking for typically requires an expensive and complex LMS (Learning Management System) that frequently costs in the tens of thousands of dollars. We offer this service to our customers for only $19.99 a month.
Colby Devitt of Wildform says that their new Wildform Online Service has gone live, and it is an easy, cost-effective alternative to expensive LMS Systems.
Wildform Online customers can:
Publish quizzes, test, surveys and & presentations and securely deliver that content to any audience.
Track who is viewing their e-learning courses, and how they respond to their quizzes and surveys with detailed, easy-to-understand reports.
Have quiz and survey results sent to anyone on the web.
Wildform Online offers several pricing plans starting at only $19.99 month. Also, a 30 day free trial is available at the Wildorm Online site...
Wildform announced an upgrade to their WildPresenter product that adds several new features:
A slide show wizard that easily create slideshows with images and SWF files. Just select your files and WildPresenter will take care of the rest.
Improved text rendering that includes small font enhancement features as well as improved text alignment.
New export dialogue --every time you export your files, WildPresenter tells you which files you exported, where they are located and which files you need in order to publish your project.
Improved export of slides that exports all the slides in your project individually at one time.
Improve slide navigation player that changes the name of the slide navigation player XML and thumbs folder.
Colby Devitt is the president and co-founder of Wildform, a multimedia software company based out of Los Angeles, USA. In this conversation, Colby discusses WildPresenter, their Flash authoring product that integrates so well with PowerPoint content.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, Wildform, and WildPresenter.
Colby: I'm the president and co-founder of Wildform and one of my main responsibilities is to oversee the marketing at Wildform. I have a liberal arts background. I grew up studying ballet very seriously, got a BA in Classics from Barnard and a masters in religion from Harvard. I've spent many years writing and in theatre, exploring the intersection of art and technology. An installation project I was working on led me to learn advanced animation programs (Alias and Wavefront) and from there I immersed myself in technology. Before starting Wildform in 1999, I worked at www.nytimes.com and before that I was in charge of marketing for a document imaging company. I have tried to retain my sense of what it is like for someone to use our products who is not enamored with technology and views it as a tool. We have always tried to make our products as easy and fun to use as possible. We have also created products that we ourselves would have wanted to use.
In many ways, WildPresenter is the synthesis of all of the technology we have developed so far. It contains a media importer that converts all images, audio and video to Flash. The origin of this technology was our original Flash video converter called Flix, which we sold to ON2. WildPresenter also has a text effects tool, which is basically our standalone product, WildFX. The timeline in WildPresenter and the ability to combine any kind of SWF file together had its origins in a previous product called Linx. WildPresenter though is much more powerful than Linx because it now contains hundreds of built in shapes, objects, flowcharts, animations, slide transitions and a whole set of drawing tools, so that you can now build entire Flash web sites with the program. In addition to being a media converter, a text effects generator, and basic Flash site builder, WildPresenter contains an entire screen recording program, like Camtasia, a quiz creator, and last but not least for your readers, a PowerPoint to Flash converter, which creates very accurate conversions with the smallest possible file size.
So, really WildPresenter is like having six major programs in one. There is nothing like it on the market. It is exactly the program that I fantasized about having when I was producing for the web at the New York Times Digital -- an easy to use multimedia program that would let me quickly combine video, audio, images, and text, so that I could create something original and compelling and post it rapidly to the web, concentrate on producing great content and not get bogged down in struggling with the software.
Geetesh: What are the new PowerPoint specific features in WildPresenter 3.3 -- and can you give us case studies of end users who create outputs from their PowerPoint presentations with WildPresenter.
Colby: WildPresenter has been a powerful PowerPoint to Flash converter for awhile, generating accurate conversions and small file sizes. What's new in version 3.3 is that we have added a "Combine Your PowerPoint and Video" wizard. We added this because we have many customers who like to combine their PowerPoint files with video and convert their projects to web-friendly Flash. The wizard streamlines the process for them. They can now execute what is technologically a very complex process in three easy steps –- select a PowerPoint, select a video and click “Next”. Once they have completed the wizard, they can change the layout and design of their project if they like. WildPresenter also comes with other wizards and we will continue to add more based on what our customers tell us they most want. Wildform has a lot of fans and we like to honor them. You can read testimonials from our customers and we feature customer examples in the Customer Gallery section of our blog.
WildPresenter 3.3 has a great new feature that allows you to import a PowerPoint presentation and a video clip within three clicks -- and you don't have to do anything else. Just wait for the program to create an output that looks similar to the screenshot you can see in Figure 1:
Figure 1: A presentation and a movie side-by-side in one output
Wildform, the creators of WildPresenter have also put up a walkthrough of the entire process on their site. Look here...
Wildform just released WildPresenter Pro 3.1, a major update to their multimedia presentation software. The update includes many requested features including:
Full screen playback mode,
FLV video seeking on the timeline,
Ability to combine an unlimited number of animations for a single object, and
We have reviewed WildPresenter in the past -- and rather than do the whole review again, this time we will explore the new features in this new version of WildPresenter.
For those of you who don't know what WildPresenter does, it is a product that allows you to import PowerPoint presentations -- thereafter you can continue editing your presentation in an editing environment that's so much like PowerPoint right down to the Slide Masters. Finally, WildPresenter allows you to output your project to a Flash SWF movie.
Wildform, Inc. announced the release of Quiz Creator, a standalone software program, which allows anyone to easily generate LMS compliant, customized Flash quizzes, tests, assessments and surveys in minutes and without the need for any programming. Quiz Creator uses a simple wizard based interface that guides customers through the quiz creation process in 3 easy steps: select a template, enter your questions and answers, preview and make additional changes or approve.
