Altus Extreme Knowledge Sharing

Listen to the column Altus Extreme Knowledge Sharing, or visit our Podcast Center to hear more by James Gaskin.

Think of YouTube gone corporate, powered by TiVO and indexed by Google search. Think searching a DVD by indexed keywords rather than movie scenes. Think of watching your CEO blather on but with the ability to skip ahead to the part where you get mentioned by name and notified of your forthcoming huge bonus (that may be a daydream, but one can hope).

If these sound interesting, check out Altus Learning Systems (altuscorp.com) and see how corporate events, invigorated by social networking video presentations, can impart more information faster and more accurately than ever. I think Altus has a great hook here, if for no other reason than every CEO believes he or she should be on TV every day. If you suffer with such a deluded CEO, at least you can search the speech transcripts and go directly to the point of the video where your search terms are mentioned.

Sebastian Grady, Altus COO, told me, "We can TiVO your events, prepare the videos, transcribe the speeches, import the presentations, and have all the material on display in just a few days." No magic, just hard work and modern video streaming technology. Speech transcriptions are performed by the best speech to text systems available: trained human transcriptionists. Once the text is available, Altus correlates video timings to the spoken text and synchronizes them with an MS SQL database. That's how they can take you to exactly the frame where your CEO promises "every employee gets a bonus this year." You can even put your personal bookmark there for repeated viewing pleasure.

The investment for the hosted service starts around $45,000 and goes up depending on the number of viewers and hours of content. Since Altus hosts all content, employees, partners, or customers can view the content from anywhere on the Internet. For instance, one huge car company videos all mechanic training sessions and makes them available to their 65,000 mechanics.

See for yourself and view presentations from the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Altus works best in Internet Explorer running Windows Media Player, but my Firefox browser did pretty well. I had to manually scroll the transcript during presentations, but at least I had a transcript to scroll. That's so Web 2.0, or maybe Web 2.5, that scrolling was fun.

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