From a little spark may burst a flame

Launching a website is a fairly stressful process. It represents the culmination of months of work, of vision, of hope, of work, and of planning. As you near the end you see results of the efforts of many. The vision of the founder who had the concept. The talent of the designer who came up with the colors, the logo, the layout. The skill of the developers who built the technology to enable something radically new and different and who had the patience to constantly chase down bugs on the site. The friends who support the site and the team with constant affirmation.
And then there is our loyal user base who visit the site, offer courses, provide ideas and tell their friends and bring on students to the site.

Launching a new venture is an exhausting, humbling, terrifying, and exhilarating moment.

This week I met new members to our community from around the world. I traded emails from an English instructor who lives in Cairo, a PhD student in India, a French teacher in Frejus, and many others. They are all passionate about helping others to learn. And that's pretty exciting.

I've spent the week juggling the business, but in my spare time I've had some time to start reading Bill Bryson's "A short history of nearly everything". It's a fantastic book that traces the history behind the scientific discoveries that have shaped the modern world.

As I read through the pages, one thing becomes clear: Great ideas start small. They start as a gathering of a few people inspired by an idea and committed to making that idea a reality. It is in that spirit that I thought I'd share with all of you a snapshot of the Revoluminary traffic. I hope that we continue to grow and spread our enthusiasm for sharing knowledge.

Thanks to all who have joined and are offering to share what they know with the world. You are Revoluminary, and that's really something tremendous. So to my fellow Revoluminaries, don't stop! Tell your friends, reach out to your communities. Together we will change the world.

More Sneak Previews...Classroom and My Revoluminary

All,

Two of the features that we’re really excited about at Revoluminary are our proprietary classroom and the account manager. These two tools are intended to make teaching and learning online easier and more effective for our community members.

The Revoluminary classroom includes interactive voice, video, instant messaging, whiteboarding, and file exchange. Best of all, you can use the classroom through any standard browser (Mozilla, Firefox, and IE), with no peering. And because you have a dedicated connection, the call won’t be dropped.

My Revoluminary

The My Revoluminary page is your personal portal to everything going on Revoluminary. This is the place to go to update your profile, add or edit new classes, checkout your schedule, check your messages, or change your user account settings.

We think it's pretty cool and will help you manage your classes easier.

Sneak preview

Fellow Revoluminaries,

We're a week or so away from launching and I wanted to give you a sneak preview of the home page. We've just finished the initial user testing of the site, and we're pretty excited about the response to our style. As for me, I recently attended the new Italian cinema film festival here in San Francisco, and am pretty fired up to learn Italian (The woman came with me to the film festival...hey, I'm doing the best I can!).

So here's the site that you'll be seeing soon:

Revoluminary Home Page