Presenter: Stewart Elliot, CEO, Modo Labs
The opening keynote of any conference usually portends the overall content and feel of the event. A nice breakfast preceded, so for now, at least my stomach is happy. Let’s see how this goes…
First items: The conference app itself was made with Kurogo Publisher, and a thank-you to the sponsors: Apperian, Double map GreyHeller, Radius Networks. Also, a shout-out to the folks who travelled the farthest and Mr. Andrew Yu, the man who started the whole thing. Cal State University was well-represented with five campuses sending reps to the event: CSUCI, SacState, Fresno, East Bay, and of course CSUN. Cal State has eight campuses using the platform. PHSC: Pasco-Hernando State College from Florida is also here (Dr. Melissa Harts from PHSC is actually sitting next to me as I type this – her presentation later is “What’s the Point?”).
Modo Labs is 5 years old this month! One of the overall goals of the platform is to enable non-technical users to “do mobile” without having to code, i.e. publishing. 2.3 is out now, and 2.4 is coming in a couple months. We’re proud to be able to deliver new iterations quickly.
“The Race to 2.0”
Fresno State beat Notre Dame to version 2.0 by 2 hours, so Cal State gets bragging rights as the first to implement 🙂
Modo Labs
Becca is new director, and changed a number of items: logo, web site, etc. The Modo Labs “ball” idea has been likened to an 8-ball, a bowling ball, and a party ball. Modo’s new logo is a building block / chevron. Modo = “the way of” Visit the new web site here: https://www.modolabs.com/
We want all universities to bring in students to develop on our platform, whether they have coding skills or not. We urge our customers to do this.
The New Frontier
Where is the demand coming from, what are customers asking for? In big demand are micro sites and multi-sites. We’re helping one of our customers scale up their installation to 400+ different experiences. In this case, crowd-sourcing becomes very important…how do you get people handle the challenge of managing all this stuff?
Modo Labs
Only independent company in this space, we’re growing 100% year-over-year. This has allowed us to strongly reinvest in our product. We also have customers in very large enterprises, hospitals and other verticals. We recently moved into a new facility that is twice the size, the space itself was designed by Eric Kim. We’d be happy to host you and your folks if you’d like to come visit us (and play foosball…it’s a big thing in our office).
It’s Just a Pen
Slide featured a Blackboard pen. When we entered the market, Blackboard was our biggest competitor, with about a 70% market share. Our product has grown by leaps and bounds, and Blackboard is now about 40%. Ellucian is really big in this space, too (and experiencing challenges from WorkDay).
Why the pen? We need to be humble about our product. Competitors can easily move into this space and change the market in unpredictable ways.
