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Today it was announced that a very large software company (let's call them "SolarProtect"), focused on the education space, would be merging with another very large software company (let's call them "Datatel", because that's their name) also focused on the education space. The result will be a monolithic giant that is, you guessed it, focused on the education space. The claim from both companies is that the new larger organization will better serve their customers (schools and universities) than they could as separate companies. It sounds nice, but I can't stop thinking that someone is making a truck-load of money in the process (which, to be fair, isn't a bad thing in and of itself) and that may have something to do with it. 

This isn't terribly surprsing news--consolidation within any mature industry is commonplace. But it got me thinking about the nature of the education space and what teachers and students need from industry to improve the learning experience. I've worked in very large software companies before, and I didn't know them to be as customer focused as they'd claim. More often than not the goals were concerned with things like market scale and channel leverage more than any true focus on the end customer (again, nothing really wrong with these things by themselves). I don't mean to suggest that the two companies referenced above won't continue to provide value to their customers (if they didn't, they'd die). But I do think there is balance in company size and it's ability to remain truly customer-focused. 

Naturally I'm biased--Pixelture is small next to the giants within our space. We are less concerned about scaling to the entire market right away or leveraging a large channel and more concerned with the actual experience that our products deliver. And I do think our size affords us a tremendous amount of customer focus and the ability for everyone in the organization to remain connected with our customers. I, for one, never want to be too busy to stop taking customer calls or hearing about a new curriculum using LearnSpace.

To that end, I humbly ask that anyone who is a current or prospective user of our products, feel free to contact me directly if you have a question, a comment or a request. I usually respond right away--but if I don't rest assured I will soon. Hearing from you, our customers, is the best part of our day--now matter how big or small we are.

Stay tuned,

Justin

justin@pixelture.com

Since we launched LearnSpace with advanced polling a few weeks back we've heard strong endorsements from our customers. People are liking the integrated survey tab and the ability to conduct quick polls with Yes/No, Multiple Choice and even open-ended questions. 

But what about graphical polling? Ever take a test that asked you to "circle" something or "cross out" something? Graphical polling is something that's unique to LearnSpace--it gives educators the ability to ask an entirely new type of question and filter the answers in a number of ways, including layering multiple responses on top of each other. We'll be producing a short How-To video before Thanksgiving (check back soon) that will explain this with some examples, but the short version is, if you like conducting student polls and surveys, you're going to love graphical polling.

If you don't want to wait for the video, you can of course check out the user's guide online and get started with it today (ask us about the two free licenses of LearnSpace for every school!). 

Stay tuned,

Justin