Among the speakers at the iDesign conference in London this week was Gerry Griffin, CEO of training company Skill-Pill. Skill-Pill have a just-in-time learning system that uses short videos (the ‘pills’ of the company name) to reinforce lessons learned in conventional training courses. The Skill-Pills are delivered to the user’s mobile phone over the wireless Internet as 3GP files that can then be watched just before a crucial presentation or negotiation, giving a quick skills top-up.
Griffin, pictured left, describes this short burst of training as bringing the trainee “back into the zone”, all the more important these days because everyone is overloaded with multiple tasks, always in interrupt-mode. Skill-Pill supports a whole variety of 3G phones handsets, and of course it’s also possible to view the ‘pills’ on video iPods. Interestingly, Griffin says that the iPhone is too “locked down” to be useful in this regard at the moment, as it effectively makes it impossible to download a video on-the-fly. Presumably on-demand video is another application that Apple want to make money out of, in conjunction with their telco partners.
Podcasts of the iDesign event can be found at http://www.nmk.co.uk. Also, Darrell Berry has more photos of the event on his Flickr site.
