Today we have a guest post from Cindy Huggett, CPLP. Cindy is the author of Virtual Training Basics, and co-author of ASTD Infolines "Simple, Effective Online Learning" and "Designing for the Virtual Classroom." She has taught hundreds of synchronous, online classes for a variety of audiences. Her favorite passion is to help trainers deliver effective and engaging live online classes. She also assists clients on their transition to blended solutions and conversion to virtual training. Cindy served on the national ASTD Board of Directors in 2009-2010 and was one of the first to earn the Certified Professional in Learning and Performance (CPLP) designation.  You can find Cindy sharing training tips via Twitter at @cindyhugg. Contact her via her website www.cindyhuggett.com. Are you an early riser? Or do you wait until the alarm clock rings, hitting the snooze button several times before dragging yourself out of bed? When it comes to virtual training, the alarm clock is ringing. Maybe you were one of the early risers, with a head start on providing virtual training to your workforce. Or maybe you are just now hearing it and biding your time while you figure out how to respond. Either way, the time is now for virtual training. The most common path to virtual training is to convert your existing traditional in-person classes to the live online environment. My new white paper, 3 Simple Steps to Move Training Online, will help you do just that. It examines the most common conversion mistakes and walks you through the three steps necessary to translate your traditional training to the online classroom. Still not sure that virtual training is right for your organization? Here are three reasons why the time is now for virtual training: Increased mobility of the workforce. According to IDC, nearly 75% of the American workforce and 35% of the global workforce will be mobile by the end of 2013. And ASTD’s recent research study on mobile learning reveals that over 85% of organizations supply mobile devices to at least part of their workforce. As your organization’s workforce goes virtual and mobile, so must your organization’s training. Increased globalization of organizations. The world continues to shrink as organizations expand their reach across international borders. Virtual training allows you the opportunity to create a community without borders. Anyone with Internet access can attend a virtual training session. And you can now provide training to employee populations who were previously excluded due to time, space or location issues.  Increased productivity for employees. When employees can stay at their desks to participate in training, they will undoubtedly realize productivity gains - less time traveling means more time getting things done. Another big advantage of virtual training is the ability to deliver it in smaller chunks of time. Employees can attend short, just-in-time training classes from their desks.  So what are you waiting for? The time is now! Download 3 Simple Steps to Move Training Online by Cindy Huggett.

First up, I'd like to welcome my new assistant, Jake Walter, to the Robiety project. He was one of the lone souls who knows Flash and to that I am very appreciative for his help. Jake has been helping with coloring, which I am very happy with, and he is now jumping head first into animating a couple shots. I'm anxious to see what he comes up with as I'm sure it will be awesome.I also have my good friend Andrew Jakubowski working on some basic toon shading for the 3D cityscape which will be used for quite a few backgrounds, so I told him to make it look nice.I've just been animating everyday doing what I can. Only a few more shots need inbetweens/cleanup/colors and then everything should be good as far as main character animation. I still have some backgrounds to paint and the implementation of sound, but I got dissss.[Begin Rant]So, last week was a very hellish week for me. Usually I go through my weekly routine with no bothers and have been doing so for the entire semester. I've been having issues with one of my LCD monitors since last fall where it would begin to flicker upon a cold boot.In the beginning it would only last a few minutes, so it was bearable. Over the weeks and months it got progressively worse. The constant flickering would take an hour or more to cease and recently took 15 straight hours before it decided to stop being a shithead.At that point I figured to leave it on 24/7, disabling sleep mode, and turn on the screensaver. That worked for a week until I cleaned my room and turned off the PC and monitors for 10 whole minutes. After that, all hell broke loose.After 72 hours of being on, the flickering wouldn't stop and I deemed the monitor unusable as of early last week. I went back to a single monitor set up from the days of old only to have my other monitor crap out in the exact same way, only it took all of 10 seconds to kill itself. I turned it on, it flickered for a few seconds, and went dim to the point where it looked like it was off.They're both 3 and 4 year old Samsungs and were quite expensive when they first came out, so I can't afford to go out and buy new ones. I did some research and it's a common problem after the 3 year mark, right after the warranty expires.I cracked open both monitors to find that the capacitors on both boards have been blown out. A normal cap has a flat top whereas the bad ones have a raised top with some inner goo leaking out.I had to desolder the bad caps to remove them and of course Radio Shack didn't have the correct capacitance I needed so I had to special order them and am waiting on those to arrive before I can hope to attempt to fix my screens. So for the time being, I've been using an 11 year old 17" HP CRT that takes up 90% of my desk and has a max resolution of 1024x768 at a refresh rate that almost doesn't kill my eyes.tl;drfml

Today we have a guest post from Mike Agron. Mike is an entrepreneur, speaker, thought leader, author and the executive webinar producer and co-founder of WebAttract, LLC. WebAttract is a professional services organization of B2B webinar experts, helping sales and marketing professionals excel at using webinars for demand creation to convert more prospects into customers. When he’s not producing webinars, Mike is an avid road cyclist. In September 2011, Mike rode 525 miles from San Francisco to L.A. in the California Coast Classic bicycle tour to raise funds for the Arthritis Foundation. I have worked with hundreds of companies - from Fortune 500 to two-person startups - that were not getting the results they expected from their webinar program because they tried to shortcut the planning process.  Do you know what you get when you do that? Disappointment! The key to successful demand-generation webinars boils down to doing three things really well: Target and attract the right audience. Keep your audience engaged. Follow up after the webinar. Here are three practical tips to help you succeed at your next webinar. Tip #1: Work the plan. You have to start with a work plan to identify and track your objectives. Included in this plan should be the details of whom you are trying to reach, what you want them to do and the details of the topic you are discussing. This work plan helps you profile your target audience, identify the desired outcomes, document your messaging ideas and, finally, define your success factors and a call to action. At the end of the webinar, what do you want attendees to do? Tip #2: Write a compelling invitation. Using the work plan, craft an invitation subject line that will compel the recipient to want to open your invite and, after reading it, click on the registration button to attend the webinar. This sounds simple enough, but I find that most invitations don’t present the topic as a "must have." Must-have information describes a pain point, and the audience you are looking for is not indifferent; they are either dissatisfied with the status quo or are actively looking for a new solution or provider to solve a vexing business challenge. This is the time to use your thought leadership. This is your opportunity to add value and to educate your audience. If you don’t communicate the must-have value of your webinar, you can bet your invite won’t get opened and considered. The invitation is where the qualifying and selling really begins. Tip #3: Track your progress using metrics. Metrics help you track and measure your progress to reach your target audience. A good predictor of webinar performance is the click-through rate (CTR). This measures how many people coming to your landing page register and how many don’t complete the form or even start to fill it out. CTR and five other key metrics are explained in more detail in the ebook download below and will help you benchmark your performance. You’re already on your way to producing more engaging and better performing webinars! I wish you continued success in meeting and achieving your webinar demand-creation objectives. Please share your questions and comments. Download the ebook: WebinarReady: A Step-by-Step Guide to Hosting Successful Webinars

I managed to fix one of two monitors by replacing the capacitors so I'm happy about that. It's been quite a few years since I've worked on a single monitor, so I have to change up my workflow to accommodate between school and home.Over the weekend I managed to get roughs in for the waterfall shot and began tie-downs and cleanup on the villain's cloak. It took me about a week to get the cloak right, having a bunch of different fully drawn attempts before I scrapped them and began anew. It looks really good now, so I'm just finishing cleanup before I send it off to my assistant, Jake, for coloring.Speaking of Jake, I got back the work I sent him last week which entailed color and rough inbetweens for a couple shots. At first I thought he didn't do anything because it played and looked fine. Then I remembered I only did keys on these shots! It looked as if I had animated it myself. It blends in so well and I'm really pleased with his work.

Robiety Work Reel 4-11-11 from Jeff Yandura on Vimeo.Those daring to dream ideals must dare to share them as realizations, lest they remain so.Robiety is the story of evolved social systems like our own, and of the ordinary individual encompassed by them. The daily grind takes both literal and figurative meanings for Sector 51's S.I.M.B. (Standard Issue Maintenance Bot) as he struggles to differentiate himself in a unified, rigid society steeped in efficiency and perfection. Working to perpetuate a civilization believing to have achieved its technological apex, he, like his fellow citizens, strives to obtain scant upgrades that enhance his status in the Robiety. With the lofty goal of attaining that one screw or bolt that elevates him to the upper echelons of Sector 51, S.I.M.B. carries out his redundant existence until a freak work accident changes the perception of his reality forever. An errant malfunction leads to dangerous, yet wonderful concepts in stark contrast to those shared as ideals throughout his world. The imperfection in his programming, S.I.M.B decides, may not be such an imperfection after all. An attempt to share this dream with his colleagues and loved ones also held captive by the monotonous existence of Sector 51 proves both daunting and inspiring. Robiety is the tale of an individual's realization, discovery, and struggle, detailing the pertinence of a utopian societal conflict when juxtaposed with our own.

Robiety is in about as good of a shape as it can be at this point. With a couple weeks before graduation, there's still a lot of animation to finalize in the next week. The movie won't be done by any means. Over summer I want to spend time doing some nice backgrounds as I had done over Christmas break; I was really happy with the way those turned out and I can take my time on them with no rushing around.I do want to put in sound effects before senior reviews on May 2nd, just so the movie engages more than one sense and keeps people interested. Music may be added at a later date but that hasn't been a main concern of mine. Animation and colors is top priority.

After months of on and off work (mostly off), the new site design is finally complete. Now that it's out of the way, I can continue to focus on Robiety and its site as well as my demo reel.

There’s nothing we love more than our customers. So when they love us back, we are proud to share it with the world! We can’t think of anything that showcases GoTo solutions better than positive feedback from our satisfied customers. Occasionally we get the opportunity to feature their stories as case studies. Below are some that we created during the last couple of months, demonstrating innovative ways that you too can benefit from Citrix products. Twestival Citrix GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar prove essential in helping an online not-for-profit organization manage worldwide fundraising events. UNC OneMBA, a global executive MBA program offered by UNC, connects students and faculty across the globe with GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. Branson School Online An online K-12 school uses GoToMeeting with HDFaces for enhanced interaction among students, parents and teachers, and GoToAssist with FastChat for efficient remote support. To read more about what our customers are saying, visit our website. We would love to hear more about how you are using our products and the benefits you are experiencing. For more information on how to share your story, email us at VoiceOfTheCustomer@CitrixOnline.com Image credit Amanda Rose. .

Yes, it's true. After sitting on the domain for a year, I finally got an idea on what to do with the site and just rolled with it. I'm really happy with the way it came out and it will house the movie upon completion.For now, I plan to export a new work reel containing new assets created after graduation.www.robiety.com

 Right now, I’m raising money for a 15 year old blind kid somewhere in Utah who wants to record his first CD. A few years ago, Kuha’o Case was sat in front of a piano for the first time and discovered that he wasn’t just interested in piano: he was insanely talented at it. He learned by himself, plays by ear, can’t read a lick of sheet music (blind, I mentioned, right?), and can hear a song once or twice and play his own interpretation exceptionally well. I decided to push my network to help him raise the $30,000 he wants for the project. Why? No reason. Jesse Stay, a colleague in the same space, posted a link to the project that I saw on the morning I wrote this article, and I watched the little video, found it moving, and decided that it’d be fun to get this guy his money. But what’s really interesting to me is learning whether my network will perform. I started by asking Neil Gaiman for a retweet. Neil has more followers than me, and his famous musician girlfriend, Amanda Palmer, just raised over $1 million on Kickstarter for her project, so I felt he’d be sympathetic. He was. At least enough to click the retweet button. I also sent the post to Bassnectar, whose first name is Lorin, because the kid did a cover of one of Lorin’s songs, so I felt he’d want to spread it. I also turned to my Twitter network plus my blog plus my Google+ network and asked them for $10. This is where it gets a bit depressing, but where it also will help us understand why cultivating a network is critical. If I ask 210,000 people for $10, and 1% of them say yes: That’s $21,000. That means that 1 on every 100 people who follows me on my various social networks could solve this request in about 10 minutes and go back to whatever it is they’re doing. But that didn’t happen. So far, I’ve only raised about $1000, and some of that was my money. That means that I couldn’t convince more than 100 people to give $10. There are other ways I could have accomplished this goal. I’m friends with plenty of reasonably successful people. I could have asked the right 300 of them for 100 dollars, and I’d be done faster. I could have sought a business sponsor to match 10,000, and then used that to leverage the money. But all of these require a bit more of an ask, and this project, while important, isn’t the same as my core charity/fundraising efforts (homelessness and autism). So, learning who to ask, how much to ask, when to tax your network, and more, are part of this. Let’s talk about some more of the knobs we can and should tweak. How Big Is Your Network Most people don’t think of the people they interact with as a network, and some people accidentally mislabel their connections as a network. Both are something to consider, and it’s up to you to determine who’s who. The biggest mistake people make is over-counting people they "can" reach as being in their network. This is practically the entire basis of public relations measurement, in my somewhat jaded opinion. For instance, though 210,000 people follow me on Twitter, probably a few thousand are people who know me fairly well, another ten thousand are very versed in my work, beyond that are people who subscribe to me because their friends do, and beyond that are maybe robots and people who don’t actually use the system. Of that number, though, how many do I think will stand up and take on any challenge at my request? Let’s call that number 200, though on some days it might be five or six people. You should think about this the same way: there are "people you could reach, people who might notice, people who pay attention, people who care, and people who love you." Those lists should be smaller and smaller and smaller, obviously. So how do you work with them? How do you Cultivate a Network? Some people (like me) work to grow an audience and then convert some percentage of them into a community. Through my writing, my speaking, my social network presence, my video shows, and more, I have built up a following of people who are interested when I create something. But from that number, the way I’ve cultivate relationships is that I do one of the following (in order of their level of involvement): Acknowledge and respond to people who speak to me. Point out the good works of others. Promote someone else’s product or service. Show allegiance or camaraderie with certain people. Offer to help certain people. Passively seek repeat opportunities to pass business to other people. Actively pass business to other people and actively help them grow business through promotion, partnership, joint ventures, and selling. Partner with other people. Those are the eight ways I know how to do it. #1 is anything from commenting back to someone on Twitter, to answering an email, to replying to a comment someone has left on my website. #2 is anything from my retweeting someone else’s work, or linking to someone’s blog post, etc. #3 is what I did at the top of this letter, by promoting Kuha’o Case’s project. And so on. I think most of us stay around the 1-3 level and rarely venture further into the fray. If so, then it’s unlikely that you’ve got a very responsive or participatory network. 1-3 is the "you scratch my back" set and isn’t especially motivated to help you beyond what you’ve done for them when the time comes. But obviously, 4-6 take some time, and 7-8 are actual work. And there, of course, is where you find the gold. It takes work to get value. And that’s the work that needs doing. An Assignment If you’re serious about wanting to grow and cultivate the value of your network, open up a spreadsheet. Start listing the names and whatever contact info you have of people, and then assign them a rank of 1-8 of what you’ve done for them LATELY. The next-to-last column are notes from your last interaction. The last column is the date of your last interaction. Remember: you SHOULD have more 1-3 ranks than most other numbers. But if you don’t have any 7-8s, you don’t have much of a network. Never on this spreadsheet keep track of who you feel owes YOU a favor. There’s never any value in that. If you do it right, you’ll have done so many favors and done so much to build up the quality of the 7-8s that if you have to ask for help, you’ll feel confident that you’ve done so. Oh, and if the last two columns are fading, it’s less likely that your 7-8 ranks are accurate, are they? So, adjust them and move on. One final detail: you’ll get a lot further and gain a lot more success if you don’t work on the "stature" of the people you help and serve. Meaning, don’t kiss up. Instead, promote the rising stars. They will always do more with you over the years than those who have "made it" and don’t likely need your help. That’s vital.