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What happens to Frog UK?

I’ve already had quite a few people ask what this means for the UK.

I understand the nervousness, I have seen many businesses, some in our field, move abroad and damage their UK operations.  We have taken a number of measures to ensure that this doesn’t happen.

Primarily, we have invested heavily into a Joint Venture business in Malaysia that is wholly responsible for the roll out of Frog to these schools.  We are not managing this from the UK.  This will not affect our day to day operations.

Kate Heal, our Operations Director, has taken a leading role in that Joint Venture, and I’m confident that she will do a fantastic job over in sunny Malaysia.

With Kate having moved on, I am currently looking for someone to help me at Frog Towers.  Do you believe that you could be the person to help us push Frog to the next level?

To try to put this into perspective, there are two separate parts to the Frog business, one is a “software house”, and the other an “education service provider”.

From the “software house” point of view we are investing in two areas immediately:

1. Additional staff to accelerate the day to day development of Frog, patch releases, “wish list” development
2. Major new developments.  On the one hand you can expect big things in mobile and tablet technology, and more focus on education specific applications.  On the other hand, expect a number of big surprises.

 

From the “education service provider” point of view:

1. Five more people have already joined our support desk, and we’re still looking for more.  Are you interested?
2. As most of you know, we recently introduced a coaching team, focussed on building up the services available to schools, with a focus on culture change rather than technology.
3. There have been significant improvements in the support process, particularly around how often we are able to update the software.  Due to the sheer number of schools that Frog now work with, we have found it increasingly difficult to upgrade all the servers out there (hundreds of them), so while we may fix issues or add new features quickly, we weren’t as responsive as we’d like to be about getting the updates onto servers.  This caused some of you much frustration.  We now have a new process in place that allows this to be done in hours, rather than weeks, or even months.  I believe this will make a significant difference to our current customers.  Thank you for bearing with us while we worked through this issue.

 

We’ve had an international team for a couple of years now and are already in more than 10 countries, ranging from Europe, to the Far East, and the Americas.  But our software development is carried out in the UK.  We get these international opportunities because of what we’re doing in the UK.

As we get bigger it is undeniably harder to keep everyone happy, but this opportunity gives us the resources to consolidate our position in England – to up our game here both from a day to day point of view and from a product development point of view.  We aim to dominate the learning platform market in England, and we intend to do that by simply doing a better job than everyone else.

Again, thank you to everyone that has trusted us over the years to help with the education of their children.  We’re at Bett on stand M50, please drop by and have a chat.

Gareth

Frog wins 10,000 new schools in Malaysia

I am delighted to announce that Frog has won the contract to provide our learning platform technology for every school in Malaysia.  This gives us the opportunity to positively impact the lives of 6 million people across 10,000 individual schools.  How exciting is that?

In a difficult economic climate, this gives Frog a tremendous opportunity to push forwards a lot harder. I can’t begin to tell you how excited we are about the things we have planned next !

We have won this opportunity in Malaysia due in part to our product, but also to what Frog schools have said about us in England.

Thank you sincerely to all our customers.  We’ve been working in education for around 12 years now, and I’m proud to say that 94% of the schools that have ever joined the Frog family are still working with us today.  I know we’ve not been perfect, and still aren’t, but we continue striving for it. Thank you again to everyone that has continued to trust us throughout our whole journey.

Before we get to all the exciting stuff (and I wish I could tell you about it !), the first thing on my list is to consolidate our position in England.  We are now hiring a number of additional support people (in fact 5 have already started here over the last few weeks).  We are also increasing the number of people in our “today development team”.  These are the guys that work on all your little niggles, the tweaks to the software that you already use, rather than the “future development team”.

Press release below:

Leading UK learning platform provider Frog, is delighted to announce that it has been selected by the Malaysian Ministry of Education (MOE) as the learning platform technology for all of the country’s 10,000 state schools under the country’s 1Bestarinet Project. The recent news positions Frog as one of the largest learning platform providers in the world.

The 1Bestarinet Project is being undertaken by the Malaysian Government to provide internet access, as well as a virtual learning environment, to all state schools in Malaysia. Following a tender last year, the project has been awarded to YTL Communications Sdn Bhd (YTL Communications) who will be providing internet connectivity to all the schools through its high speed wireless 4G mobile network.

The Frog learning platform will be delivered through FrogAsia Sdn Bhd (FrogAsia) a joint venture between Frog and the YTL Group of Malaysia. This project is set to radically transform the way teaching and learning is delivered in the country.

Frog will be used in all 10,000 state schools in both Peninsular Malaysia and East Malaysia, serving a total of 6 million users from YTL Communications’ purpose built data centre in Sentul, Kuala Lumpur.

The Frog learning platform is an inclusive solution that will meet the needs of all schools, regardless of their abilities or geographical and socio-economic barriers. All schools, whether urban or rural, will have access to the same, high quality resources and content, giving equal delivery of education to all Malaysian children. The new learning platform solution will support collaboration between high and low performing schools, sharing best teaching methods and resources – helping all schools to raise standards in the way teaching is delivered to students.

Gareth Davies, Managing Director of Frog said: “We have won this opportunity because of the success we have created in the UK, both for ourselves and for the schools that we work with.

“We are delighted to be expanding abroad with an opportunity of this scale and have invested heavily into a local joint venture with YTL to ensure both this project is a success, and that it does not adversely affect our performance in the UK. In fact, we are very excited about the future road map that we are now able to provide for our schools in the UK due to this expansion. The next few years will be extremely exciting, both for Frog and our customers.”

Through FrogAsia, the company plans to continue to expand its operations in the Far East.

BETT Radio hear about Frog’s School Improvement Team

Last week I spoke to Russell Pru from BETT Radio about what we’re going to be showcasing at this year’s BETT show. Listen to the interview below:

More detail available on the Frog Blog here

For those not aware, we are also going to be speaking immediately following Michael Gove at the Education Leaders Conference.  Apparently there are some VIP tickets that we can give away for this, so click on this link to see the full details on the Frog Blog.

We’re on stand M50 and I’m hoping that we can get everything agreed soon enough to tell you about some very exciting developments, especially for those of you that would love to join the Frog family but are struggling with budgets at the moment….

Moseley Park School Build cool iReview site in Frog

Luke Bennet (@lukeyboy) from Moseley Park School from Wolverhampton just sent our guys some screen grabs of their iReview, which look great, so I’ve put them on here along with a description from Luke:

Luke:

iReview has been part of our frog site for 2 ½ years now. This year our whole VLE underwent a rebrand and this included iReview, which was given a new design. iReview is there to allow pupils to submit reviews of music, DVD’s and Video Games. Its aim is to improve literacy skills as well as increase the usage of our frog platform. It has managed to do both of these. One of the students that submitted a review last year is now in year 11 and applying for journalism courses and is using his review as part of his portfolio. Throughout the school we encourage the use of iReview with posters placed around the school in key areas.

It was built using Photoshop and then simply added to frog using the background brick. The covers are then inserted using the columns and text and pictures brick. There is also a simple form on a separate with a file upload brick added to it to allow the reviews to be submitted online by students.

Nice innit?

First Guest Frog Blog

Graham Quince, from Cramlington Learning Village has just written the first guest post on the new Frog Blog, about Mobile Learning.

You can find it here: http://frogtrade.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/mobile-learning-%E2%80%93-is-it-really-all-that/

Bowers & Wilkins – Fantastic Customer Service Experience

I’ve recently had a fantastic customer service experience that I felt compelled to pass on.

I bought a Bowers & Wilkins iPod Dock (Zeppelin) a little more tan 2 years ago.  It developed a loud buzzing noise whenever I plugged my iPhone in.

I called their support line and my two year warranty had expired.  They said this made no difference, and they’d sort it out any way.

Because I’d thrown the box away a long time ago, they posted a new box to me to pack the unit in, along with instructions on how to send it back to them by a courier, paid for by them.

I received e-mails at every point of the process, box arrived, engineer working on it, engineer completed, box posted back to me.

It’s been on the floor for a couple of days and I’ve just unpacked it, to find that they’ve also replaced the the cloth cover on the outside and possibly some other external parts.  It looks like it did when I bought it.

They  also reinstated a new two year warranty.

I’m going to include below a few lines from their letter:

“On behalf of Bowers & Wilkins, please accept our apology for any inconvenience you may have experienced as a result of having to return your Zeppelin for repair.

We have repaired your unit without charge and have taken the opportunity to replace external parts, where possible, which might have exhibited signs of wear and tear, again at no cost to you.

At Bower & Wilkins we take great pride in building superior products. [...] In this instance our product did not live up to the highest standards of excellence you should expect from us, and we sincerely regret this.

We greatly appreciate the faith you placed in Bowers & Wilkins when you purchased your Zeppelin.  As a small token of our gratitude, we are renewing this products two-year warranty, effective from the date of this letter.  [...]“

Great service.  Great communication.  Great letter.

Any Froggies reading this: this is the kind of service and communication we are aiming for.

Froggy email ban extended !

Results just in, and surprising they are too !

Worst offender for “cheating” and sending internal emails was only running at 6 emails per day, which is a lot less than I expected.

Feedback from the team and personal observations:

1. Design and Support Teams – more able to focus more on work as not constantly interrupted by email that needs responses
2. Development Team – less able to focus on work as people kept coming and asking questions
3. Spirit and community in the company much better
4. No need to sit and go through emails every morning before starting work
5. More understanding and ownership / responsibility for issues when they are passed verbally
6. Much better camaraderie between departments
7. Particularly interesting, this one: people picking the ‘phone up a lot more to folks NOT in the office (i.e. customers and remote workers, instead of using email, too)

Generally, and somewhat surprisingly, a resounding success !!

Unanimous decision made (outwardly at least) to continue for another week or two and see what happens.  Not a single hand went up for going back to email communication !

I was honestly expecting a bit of a failure and thought twice about putting my original post on here in case we looked like idiots a week later.  Instead, it feels like, for the moment at least, we’ve broken a bad habit that has had more of an effect on us than just internal email.

Froggy email banned for a week

Like most other organisations, Frog is drowning in email. I get 200+ every day, not including the spam. Most of these come from people in the office. Often the people sat next to me.

I’m presuming that this is just a bad habit we’ve got into and not that people can’t bear to speak to me…… I’m also aware that I’m cc’d into a lot more than I need to be for a variety of reasons.

So we’re going to ban all internal email for one week starting on Monday to see what happens.

People will have to pick a phone up, or if they’re feeling really brave, get off their arse and go and speak to someone.

Thought I’d blog this in case we learn anything interesting on the journey. I’m sure there’ll be both issues and benefits, if anything useful comes up I’ll put it in here.

It’ll be interesting to see how we all get on, because I genuinely believe that many of us come to work without a clear focus on what we’re trying to achieve day to day because we’ve fallen into a trap of sitting at our email first thing in the morning and just robotically going through it. I’m hoping that despite some inevitable issues, it’ll force all of us to stop and think about what we’re supposed to be doing all day.

Obviously, this is only internal email. Having said that, I’m sure that the various remote teams, like sales, or training, would much rather get a ‘phone call and a bit of human interaction than an email. And so would our customers…

Not a rant, just an experiment.

Comments from people gratefully received. Anyone tried this before?

G

Noyana Recording #frog11

For those that went to the Frog Conference this year, David pearl sent along the recording from his ‘phone of us all singing Noyana.  I thought you might like to hear yourselves again:

Thanks David !