Reading Marathon

We have just completed our first reading marathon! We hope this will be happening yearly from now.

This happened as part of the pilot project where thousands of pupils are testing our new social reading platform, Lesemester (literally “reading master”). They have now collected points, challenged each other, added each other as reading friends and not least read almost half a million pages.

The iPad app is used by pupils, while teachers have a dashboard given them overview both aggregated and on for the individual reader. Recently the app was released for all other platforms, including for Chromebooks where we are seeing schools onboarding these days. Upcoming features include more statistics and gamification even for the teachers and a timeline view of the class reading activity.

And the winners? 4B at Ågotnes skule – winning half a year with devices from everyone from HP and Microsoft. Runner-ups won super nice book packages in both physical and digital form.

The app is used by pupils, while their teacher gets overview in a personalized dashboard

Digital books on big screens in classrooms

We are currently visiting Bett and actually just signed with a client that will be using our platform to produce enhanced ebooks specifically tailored to usage in the classroom, often by the teacher on a big screen. Our rich palette of enrichments as well as our strong support for layers of interactions that can be easily turned on and off was the deciding factor to choose our offering.

The titles will likely include usage of our API-integration to use internal and industry standard login services, as well of adding interactive widgets beyond our standard palette to the books. One prime example of this will be lookups in dictionaries in books focused on language training.

The client also had some ideas for additional features, which I can’t share any more details about at this point – but will for sure do that later. As always we are developing the features on the condition that they will be standard features for all our enterprise users as soon as they are ready.

If you want a, virtual or physical, demo of how TapBookAuthor.com can be used for books projected on a screen in the classroom contact us – or, if you are at Bett today, grab me! Happy Friday!

User Forum #3

Today we held our third user forum, in the cinema at Oslo Science Park, where we are currently situated in the EdTech Lab. The attendance was good, and we were super proud to see what our customers are creating as well as showing some goodies ourselves in terms of new functionality.

Social Reading from Samlaget
Bjørn Terje Bakken is showing the social reading app from Samlaget

The highlights included:

  • A presentation from GAN Aschehoug of their Bokbussen app
  • A presentation of how TapBookAuthor is helping Samsung KidsTime create around 40 rich titles for the award winning titles from seven countries in South East Asia
  • A look at the new backend technology for social reading, with pilot customer Samlaget as the first user (utilizing more or less our complete backend platform including Reading Analytics, gamification and social challenges, the subscription engine as well content delivery and a rich reader app)

We also announced a new partnership with voice-over professionals with talent from all over the world available, new employees (we are now 10 counting part time employees!) and several new clients.

In the practical demos of new functionality, we went from idea to fully functional app on our Android Tablet in a few minutes. The app included camera interactions, free hand drawing, drag and drop, text input and of course sounds and videos.

If you want to get a version of the “highlight reel” from our user forum demoed live over Skype, please give us a ping. We are also planning to start doing regular webinars that we think will complement our library of HOWTO videos in a great way.

Hope to see you in person the next time we are arranging our user forum!

What a Challenge!

A little while ago we joined a hackathon put together by Telenor Digital, as part of their Digital Winners conference. And in case you didn’t know, a hackathon is an intense collaboration trying to make tangible results in a short time, often between different people from other teams and companies.

The goal was to find a problem and come up with a solution within 48 hours. If not perfect, the solution would hopefully demonstrate how technology could help solve the problem.

2015-10-22 14.32.55 HDR

Our team consisted of Cecilie Liset & Kamilla, service design students at Arkitekthøyskolen in Oslo, Colin Dodd & Ingrid Ødegaard from the video chat service appear.in  and of course our own Sondre Bjørnebekk, founder of TapBookAuthor.com.

Since Norway and many other countries are destinations for a great number of refugees these days, we decided to let our task focus on newly arrived refugees by giving them a simple tool for learning basic language skills.

To kickstart our research we made contact with the managers of the Facebook group Refugees welcome to Norway. They put us together with Ahmad, a high school student who agreed to do a quick video interview with us in appear.in.

We also spoke to people from the Red Cross who work with welcoming refugees on a daily basis, as well as guiding them in their new home town. We should probably have done more research, but the time aspect is unfortunately a part of the game when it comes to a hackathon.

Anyway we asked Ahmad a load of questions to get closer to a possible solution. Here are a couple of them:

  • What was it like arriving in Norway and starting to learn the language?
  • Do you speak English? (The interview was done in Norwegian, as he spoke it very well.)
  • What was most hard to learn as regards the Norwegian language?

Based on our own research and Ahmad´s response we kept working on our idea, finding an app to be a good solution. Then Kamilla and Cecilie sketched out the journey from when a refugee arrives, until he/she starts learning the language, finally showing how our app could fit into this. Check it out here: https://vimeo.com/143230111

We decided to use TapBookAuthor’s own technology to make the actual app, and started to make a skeleton for a book. The book-app would first take the learner through a few language lessons, before a quiz would check out how much was learned. Finally the learner could use the appear.in video chat room inside the book, and chat with another learner who also wants to practice. In this way learning becomes both fun and interactive, in addition to having a social aspect.

To promote the idea we thought of informing about the app with posters in areas that refugees have go through when they arrive. We also made a simple webpage prototype for this purpose. The idea was simply to show how a solution like this could work, so we didn’t actually make real content for the language lessons. But we really hope that someone who works with educational material might be interested in picking up this idea and put it into life!

We believe that there could be some quick rewards for everybody by making it easier for newly arrived refugees to start learning Norwegian in this way. And if you have the content – we have the technology!

Do contact us if you’re interested!

Oh, and one more thing:

In addition to the group creating the prototype of the language app for refugees, team member Colin Dodd created his own small interactive picture book in just a few hours. During a demonstration of it the book asked him for a few details, including his phone number. Unfortunately Colin lost contact with his robot. But a bit later, after flipping a few pages, his phone started calling, and it spoke to him in a somewhat metallic voice?! It was his lost robot calling!

2015-10-22 16.32.34

That fun concept, bridging the digital and physical, showed a cool way of using our API, which basically lets the user include any piece of HTML5 as a widget inside our interactive books. During the presentation someone even suggested a book using Google Earth to show a picture of your house in a horror story, and THEN the phone rings … Maybe too creepy?

If you have ideas for how you could use the API, please drop us a line and we’ll set you up with an early access user for free!

 

Announcing an API

We are happy to launch our newest major feature; an API for developers wanting to combine the efficient production of rich interactive content in our visual online editor with custom development.

The API is already in practical use. One example is the title “Eg og Pontus går i land” where singer-songwriter Odd Nordstoga is singing his marvellous book (you can still read it yourself, if you prefer to!), illustrated by the excellent Rune Nyhus. You can see the title in action in the screenshot below.

This book, with a completely custom menu, autoplay of pages, various animations and zoom effects, shows one way of using the API (mainly it is controlling timing and menu, the effects are actually created using standard tool features).

Other use cases include custom bookshelves beyond what you can already do directly in the visual tool, as well as creating a very rich custom-coded infographic as part of a tool-produced interactive book for e-learning. Two examples of the former use case are being released the coming week or so, in fact.

The API functions include (but are not limited to):

  • Starting/stopping sounds and videos
  • Navigating to new pages (known as scenes in TapBookAuthor.com), titles or chapters
  • Kicking off animations
  • Hiding and showing layers or individual objects
  • Using in-app-purchases to enable functionality and content
  • Tracking user actions to our Reading Analytics backend
  • Change menu state and look
  • Opening/fetching pages from the Internet
  • Opening the email client of the device operating system

Do you see a missing feature or something you would like to add? Let us know!

Next week the API will be officially launched at a hackathon at Telenor. We are really looking forward to it. One of our ideas is to create apps helping refugees from Syria and neighbouring countries. It will be interesting to see what the hackers can come up with.

Reading Analytics

If you are following the the tech press, you might grow a bit tired of the term “Big Data”. Thus, I will not use it again in this short blog post. But the fact is we are now working hard to finalize the architecture for version 2 of our analytics platform (the first version dates back a few years and was tightly integrated into the authoring tool, this new one is running completely separately from the content production platform). This is an important part of an innovation project for which we have gotten some funding from Innovation Norway.

The most recent incarnation of Reading Analytics in TapBookAuthor.com goes way beyond the basic counting of titles and pages that the user accessed. Did the users really use the quiz on page 8? How about the video on the credits page – was it money well spent? Stop guessing and gain actionable insights to optimize your next titles, and learn in detail how your readers are spending their time by utilizing Reading Analytics.

Our Reading Analytics platform also allows for clients to plug in their own Business Intelligence platforms and feed data into production systems, if they desire. And opposed to old fashioned data warehouses (I avoided saying the B-word!), these can efficiently be queried and we provide a set of default real-time-updated widgets and reports as well.

If you want to join our beta program for our updated Reading Analytics platform or have some input for us, please contact us.

Subscription Engine Running

Ortopediteknikk from Tell is one of the titles using digital delivery of titles with license check
Ortopediteknikk from Tell is one of the titles using digital delivery of titles with license check using our Subscription Engine

Maybe we are too modest, but today – after several customers have been using it for almost a year – we are announcing at new product; nicknamed a subscription engine. Sometimes even refer to it with the cryptic description as a “white label subscription backend”. More simply put the product lets our Enterprise Edition customers packet, deliver and sell digital products in any way they want.

The product is API-driven and can integrate with the customers’ e-commerce solutions or run standalone. One use case would be using it to run a set of digital subscriptions, another a digital bookstore selling individual titles and a third to sell licenses in bulk to schools. Or all of the above! 🙂

If you want to discuss options or have a potential use case, please contact us.