Conceived of by a small group of e-learning professionals working together at Kaiser Permanente, QMIND came into being in mid-2004 and just released its first product, also called QMIND, just this past October (2005). The highly flexible and labor-saving application takes a unique approach to addressing the challenge of collaboratively creating, producing and distributing high-quality curriculum or other multimedia content (marketing, sales, and even entertainment presentations) quickly.

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QMIND is a Web-based, ASP-hosted application that, according to QMIND’s Founder and CEO Michael Berkley, allows a multimedia or e-learning development team to go from curriculum concepting and storyboarding to finished presentation/lesson with better cooperation, shorter turnarounds and more efficient re-use of materials and efforts. Content experts, marketers, trainers and artists can collaborate, share documents, compile edits, archive discussions and so forth. Storyboarding and review, previously a largely linear process, can be re-envisioned as an integrated set of tasks conducted in tandem by all project participants who can turn around and respond to feedback more quickly than before.

QMIND keeps a history of changes at various stages, by different collaborators, and allows for roll-back to previous versions easily. You can save a “snap-shot” at any point before significant changes are made. And once the storyboard designs have been created, the program’s template system allows this material to be used as a blueprint for what the final production will look like, or it can be rolled easily rolled into a Flash-based multimedia format with relatively little effort, and become the final presentation.

The built-in time-tracker provides a convenient, integrated way to allocate billable hours to different project components, projects or clients, for example. With typical multimedia productions costing as much as $25,000/hr. to produce, QMIND allows the multimedia project to be broken down into phases and bill rates, and calculate the time and cost savings. It tracks team members’ time, status across projects, history tracking per asset (video clip, text file, image, effect, etc.) by user, and so forth. Because this information is exportable in standard Microsoft Excel format, it is easy to import into most standard accounting systems.

Another clever feature is the program’s ROI calculator that helps the team estimate project costs and returns, determine efficacy and keep projects in scope and on track. There are also optional add-ons for Project Management (PM) and Production Automation (PA). The PM option provides scheduling, budgeting, task and resource management, reporting and storyboard archiving. The PA option includes storyboard to multimedia automation, a Flash WYSIWYG template design tool, non-Linear navigation, XML export of content and other rapid publishing and deployment tools.

The company sees its largest markets among e-learning developers in large organizations for HR, IT, marketing, sales, new hires, etc. They also target higher education environments, government entities and third-party creative agencies who develop sales and training materials for their clients. There are, of course, a bevy of other applications for this versatile and user-friendly multimedia development tool.

However, there are a goodly number of serious multimedia authoring and productions tools on the market--Macromedia Flash itself certainly amongst the most notable—and QMIND does not see itself to be a true competitor in this market. Instead, the company sees its primary strength in concentrating on providing tools particularly useful to those attempting to collaborate on crafting content-rich curriculum and bringing it to an information-hungry audience in a complete, easy-to-assemble, compelling package.

In fact, a recent Gartner report predicts that “edutainment” will become a popular approach corporations will use more and more for employee training this year.

Pricing is quite reasonable at $99/user/month. The Project Management and Production Automation add-ons each run an additional $49/user/month.

Overall, the application seems intuitive to use and a great tool for managing the multimedia and elearning development process. I did find a few interface quirks and noticeable, but harmless inconsistencies in nomenclature and coordination between help screen directions and actual menu procedures. Berkley mentioned that usability will receive some minor tweaking in the next iteration, due out soon.

QMIND was started with a lean 250K investment and is in the process of raising an additional $500K in angel funding. In mid-2006, the company will begin its campaign for a first VC round anticipated to be between $3 – 5MM.

You can learn more about QMIND at www.qmind.com (I recommend the entertaining, slightly sarcastic demo to get a good feel for what QMIND does well) or contact Michael Berkley, CEO directly at michael.berkley@qmind.com.

-- Ann M. Marcus