Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Bobby Yazdani, Founder and CEO of SABA (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I think that is a reasonable point to underscore.

Bobby Yazdani: There are a couple of other important points. The sessions, where the content is being delivered, would have to manage the same amount of data from users and learners. Whether you are on a smartphone, on a desktop or in a classroom, your profile would have to be adequately managed in real time. In cases of computing experience, it needs to be personalized for you. If I am a French speaker or a German speaker, I expect my environment to be German or French – not only the content, but also the experience itself has to be personalized independently of the device.

SM: But that is all dependent on the organization’s situation. If the organization decides not to localize the content to that many languages, or only decides to do it for two or three languages, that would be really up to them.

BY: That is right. All platforms are their responsibility and their policy.

SM: There is also a huge cost involved in delivering something in 15 languages. That is definitely a business decision. I don’t think that is necessarily a mobile or social decision.

BY: The social part of it is related. We have a number of customers who use our technology to enable a customer’s partners. If you have a billion Chinese speakers and 700 million Arabic speakers, then there is a tendency to support those markets. With social, I mean social technology.

SM: I still believe it is a business decision. If the company decides to go after the Chinese market, they will localize the content to the Chinese. I don’t believe it has anything to do with mobile and social.

BY: Independent of the technology, that is correct.

SM: After all, it is a decision of which market they go after. Let’s move to the core mobile and social impact on your technology and your customer base. What is happening in the learning world or learning enablement system world vis-à-vis mobile and social? I can tell you I see a lot of learning technologies shaping up in my incubator. Some people are working on rich media, interactive communication platforms that compete with stuff like GoToMeeting or WebEx, and they are addressing certain gaps in WebEx. In some cases people provide not only the receptacle of these kinds of systems, they also provide all the capabilities to move, for example, a university from an offline model to being able to cater to their online customer base. I am seeing different types of companies in my universe. I am curious what you see in your universe in terms of customers asking about things related to road maps, for example. What are the drivers and trends you are responding to?

BY: On the social front, there is broad awareness in enterprises that formal learning is an element of learning, not the entire approach. Social learning and captioning or exposing that to a systematic approach would augment the creation of yet another venue for the knowledge workers in which to learn. I think there is a significant trend in large enterprises to not only to enable formal learning on the Internet, but also to capture as much of the social learning as possible that is going on every day and repurpose it. Social learning is a very important fabric of enablement in large enterprises. The more you can capture and expose it, the more it is reused.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Bobby Yazdani, Founder and CEO of SABA
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