Origionally posted at: http://www.insightssuccess.com/edcast-ai-powered-knowledge-cloud-platform-that-drives-performance/
EdCast: AI Powered Knowledge-Cloud Platform that Drives Performance
Humans are endowed with the most sophisticated, impeccable and unequaled tool by nature, The Brain. This natural computer needs to be fed constantly to make the rest of the auxiliary parts of the human body, purposeful. This is the tricky part, and this very feeding part has become even more complex with the advent of various digital resources.
Our mind has a conscience which is based upon the received knowledge. So, it is evident that all the decisions that we take are built upon the things we know. For various business houses, skill upgradations are essential to extract the right business value. Simply put, the right people should be able to figure out the right actions at the right moment.
There is a massive deluge of information and an equally desperate need to scavenge through this information at the earliest. Apart from this external content, each enterprise has content locked in their SME (Subject Matter Expert) minds, which is “tacit knowledge”. The $100 billion problem is that corporate employees spend 15% of their time in unproductive search. We could easily avoid this $100B loss by incorporating sophisticated technologies such as AI and ML. This is where EdCast comes in to the rescue by infusing AI and ML along with cloud and mobile to bring the right content to the right user through intelligent curation and routing. EdCast’s award-winning Knowledge Cloud uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics to weave together internal content, expert insights, and millions of external resources into an easy-to-use, distributed personalized knowledge discovery platform.
The Network for the Lifelong Learner
The Current Knowledge economy that we live in is no longer about developing a skill for the first 25 years of your life and then applying it to the rest of your life. Everyone should become a lifelong learner to adapt to the ever-changing scenarios of the industry.
The present culture is profoundly influenced by the popularity of the social media and people are dedicating a significant part of their activity on these social media platforms. EdCast taps into this behavior, but with the purpose of enriching their user’s life by giving them knowledge and a healthy learning experience.
The basic structure of EdCast has been built in accordance with the currently popular social media platforms so that people who are familiar with these platforms could easily relate themselves with EdCast. The familiarity begins with the feeds, where a user could post SmartBites and Pathways. These feeds are based on the channels the user subscribes to and it obviously pertains to their area of interest. The Pathways are a kind of a micro-learning course that is mostly curated by professional trainers and trusted authors. EdCast has also introduced Live Feed Feature. The SmartBites enables the user to share a web page or a video on their feeds.
Users can also download the EdCast App on their mobile phones to instantly post SmartBites on their feeds. The members of EdCast powered organizations can take both micro-content and macro-courses and consequently receive credentials, badges and certificates.
Today, EdCast’s solutions such as Learning Experience Platform (LXP) and SalesU (www.salesu.io) Suite of sales enablement tools are being used by more than 50 companies, including GE, HP, Dell EMC, Salesforce, Shire, and Accenture.
The Disruption to the Traditional Learning
With the track record of building large-scale transformational technology solutions, EdCast’s executive team is passionate about enhancing enterprise knowledge-sharing, training and learning experiences for organizations around the world.
In phase 1, EdCast is focused on solving the problem at large enterprises that include Fortune 500 or G2000. The wide exploitation of the digital world has generated a large amount of fragmented and disparate data that needs a unified discovery. This is exactly where EdCast is showcasing all its pioneering innovations. With a globally scaled customer base, the team at EdCast is scaling their capabilities to a whole new level.
The Man with the Heart for the Financial Nomads
Karl Mehta, CEO and Founder of EdCast has donned many hats. He is a Serial Entrepreneur, Investor, Engineer, Author and a Civil Servant. He has over 20 years of experience in founding, building, and funding technology companies in the U.S. and International markets.
This Computer Science Engineer has a strong background in building large-scale platforms for the complex technical problem. Karl has leveraged the encouraging ecosystem in Silicon Valley and has taken more risks early on in his life to building companies from the ground up. As of today, all his companies enjoy several million dollars of exit value, which his investors, employees, and co-founders cherish. He is passionate about leveraging technology and entrepreneurship to make a difference to about 4 billion people. Karl is always obsessed with the idea of improving daily access to knowledge and learning that is personalized and drives performance for everyone. Karl firmly believes that the income gap we see in the world is a direct result of the skills gap and he wants to solve that problem and bring more economic equality through EdCast.
Karl Mehta was a Venture Partner at Menlo Ventures, where he focused on finding and funding interesting and world-changing companies. Karl has worked as a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the White House in its inaugural batch. During his short stint as a civil servant, he learned about different problems at national and global scale and was instrumental in devising solutions for the same. It was during this time that Karl was struck with the idea of the now popular “Code for India.” He had founded PlaySpan, a virtual currency based Wallet Company which VISA later acquired. Karl has penned down his experience at White House and his endeavors as an entrepreneur in his book titled “Financial Inclusion at the bottom of the Pyramid.” In this book, he has described how entrepreneurial skills can be extended to the less fortunate people in the world.
Spreading Knowledge for the Betterment of Mankind
If we glance back into the future, then it is evident that all the progress of humanity has stemmed from those unique unreasonable people who have customized the world as per their wish. And of course, today we call them entrepreneurs. Karl advises to be that unreasonable crackerjack, one needs to have confidence, courage, and conviction to challenge the status quo and propose innovation.
Everyone is in possession of certain kind of knowledge; knowledge which is supposed to be shared to help others. This is the very purpose behind the idea of EdCast. Karl is on a mission to enable all the competent around the world to give back to the world the knowledge that they have received and put it out without any inhibitions or reservations of any sort. By virtue of EdCast, many people are connected to each other who are all sharing their knowledge with each other. With EdCast, Karl, the entrepreneur, has proclaimed to the world that wealth is not just about money. It is about creating the wealth that helps to give back to the society. His ‘Code for India’, a non-profit organization in Silicon Valley, brought together a community of techies, both in India and around the world, to help in the development of India from a digital standpoint and hence aid in nation building. Since it complements the Digital India initiative, Karl has received all the backing from the Prime Minister of India when he attended the Hackathon session held in Silicon Valley, in association with Google.
Keeping Customer at the center of all activities
The core value of the EdCast team is to be customer focused. They solve a problem from the customer’s point of view and apply the most cutting-edge technology to come up continuously with better solution. Karl and his team have great respect for the engineering culture that has the enthusiasm and talent to solve the hardest problem. They partner with enterprises in building the problem statement and co-creating the use-cases and economic impact models. Their close collaboration with their clients goes all the way to deploying and implementing their knowledge.
Karl cites an interesting instance that showcases EdCast’s unmatched customer service. EdCast was invited by a Fortune 100 Pharma & Life Sciences company to solve their issue of personalized knowledge discovery. Karl and his team built integrations to over 10 internal systems including their SABA LMS, and also built a white list of over 500 sites externally that they should be tracking daily. They have also trained the SMEs of this pharma company to record their tact knowledge. These content pipes are now pushing content to EdCast’s own NLP that is calibrated with the taxonomy engine. This way EdCast can drive AI and ML driven personalization and unified mobile app and web app to provide a seamless user experience. EdCast is continuously expanding its API framework to support more work apps. This way they could compress the distance between working and learning to nothing.
Giving EdCasters a reason to Rejoice
There is no doubt that EdCast has a great future ahead and it will transform the entire world by bringing daily lifelong learning in the palms of everyone. Although it seems like EdCast is just getting started, they are already on-board with the idea of implementing AR/VR to bring more knowledge and learning with immersive experience.
