Revoluminary Thoughts has Moved!

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Dorm Room Entrepreneurs

I’d like to extend my thanks to Chris Pund over at DormRoomBiz.com for getting us some attention on his blog about student entrepreneurship. While a lot of students go through college worrying about classes and interviewing for jobs, a self-selecting minority doesn’t wait for graduation to earn some cash. The DormRoomBiz blog helps students find ways to earn money from their dorm rooms, be it via blogging, reselling on eBay, designing web pages or even mowing lawns!

Revoluminary presents an entirely new opportunity for students by allowing them to start their own tutoring businesses without ever leaving their dorm rooms. In fact, we are looking for exactly the type of entrepreneurially-minded students that Chris features on his blog. Anyone that speaks a second language, knows how to conduct interviews or has taken classes that others need help with can now earn money as an online tutor. Thanks again, Chris.

Check out the posting below:

(http://www.dorm-room-biz.com/2008/06/06/are-you-revoluminary/)

Max

A new look

Things are progressing here at Revoluminary, and I thought I'd give a quick update. As several of you have noticed, we've spruced up the homepage recently! This is the first of a number of changes that will be unveiled over the summer as we continue to evolve Revoluminary and to improve the look, feel, and features available to our community.


I'd also like to welcome Max to the team. We're excited to have him on board and cranking away. Max will be heading up our online marketing effort and comes to us with a very strong background in tech enabled education.

- Pete

Getting the Word Out

With the headcount here at Revoluminary growing exponentially (with the addition of yours truly), we're excited to aggressively push to get the word out about our site. While students may be out for the summer, we'll be pushing hard to improve the site and provide more features for our users.

For example, the good folks at www.DarnGoodReviews.com just wrote an awesome review of Revoluminary. Check us out:



Traveling abroad this summer? Take a language class! In preparation for my trip to Jordan, I personally took "Arabic Lessons 01", a class from Antoinette and Paul over in Egypt. They taught me some reading basics and a few phrases to get around. Paul also made good use of our Course Files feature and had a PowerPoint presentation ready to go through. We went through fairly quickly, and he had a second one ready (so I got two lessons for the price of one!).

Look forward to exciting things coming out of Revoluminary this summer. While students may be out of school, we'll be pushing hard to improve the site and include more features. Next month, we'll be rolling out a few FREE resources for our students to improve their experience outside of our interactive classroom.

Max

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