That is all.

Guy Oliver joins us as our new Operations Director. Guy spent 21 years in the financial services sector. Because there’s a lot of money at stake in this market, Guy has had to learn how to make very demanding customers very happy. Guys latest position was to head up a £7.5M business unit with responsibility for customer services, professional services delivery and software development.

We asked Guy if he wanted to say something. This is what he came up with, “I am very excited by the opportunity that I have been given to help guide Frog on the next stage of its incredible journey.  Frog has very clever people producing game changing software that is streets ahead of the competition.  My challenge is to channel that creative energy, compliment it with some rather boring, but essential processes and procedures in order to enable Frog tomeet its commitments to all its customers whilst continuing to lead the field in the development of Learning Platform applications”

Shaun Geoghegan joins us from RM.  Shaun was previously responsible for the development team of the RM Integris MIS product.  Shaun is now building a team of people around him, and absorbing our current MIS integration team of 3 people, to build very rich integration with the UK’s main MIS systems, allowing us to provide you with fully integrated web based interfaces to your current MIS.

Jack Nattress joins us to build a Programme Office in Frog, introducing processes and procedures in our business. We have grown exceptionally quickly and this has caused us growing pains on a number of different occasions. Jack is building a growing team of people to both create procedures and ensure they are adhered to.  Jack is also introducing a dedicated QA team to supplement the quality assurance and testing done within the development team.  This process has already reaped fantastic rewards with the robustness of our latest release of Frog4OS, and we fully expect it to create big improvements with the other areas of Frog.

Our support team has grown to 17 people. While there will obviously be a period of “bedding in”, we have deliberately over-hired in this area in order to create excess capacity. This will improve not only our response times, but will allow us to spend more time with each school, improving the quality of the help we can give you. There are also some significant structural changes happening in our support team.

We have had an army of new developers join us over the past few months, in fact, we are struggling for space in our offices now and have had to introduce home working and hot desking (sometimes two at a desk) to fit everyone in until our new offices are ready to be moved in to. And we’re still looking for more developers. Lots more.

Susan Banister joins us from Uniservity (and previously Espresso Education) to head up our UK sales team. I’ve been told by one eminent educationalist than one person that Susan understands schools and their issues better than any other sales person he knows and that I should listen to everything that she says. So far, so good, I’m happy to report ;0)

Graham Thorpe rejoins us from Capita, after taking a little journey through Ramesys. Graham is currently focussing all his attention on the Malaysia project. Adam Hepton rejoins us after taking leave of his senses and thinking that the grass was greener somewhere else! As does Alan Burgoine.

First a little background.  We built a completely separate development team here at Frog UK back in 2011 and have been secretly working on this project.  This new version already has more than 6 man years of development on it, and this is just the beginning.  As you’ll know from my other blog posts, we are currently hiring developers at Frog as quickly as we can find them.

This is only a two minute video and all I’m showing you is how applications run in Frog4OS and how you upload files.  If you want to find out more (and maybe get a proper demo ;) then you’ll need to come to our conference on June 19!  I’ll also be outlining Frog’s bigger vision for the future, and there will be some surprises!  Click here to find out more about our conference, hope to see you there!

I recorded this in a low resolution so you can see it more easily in YouTube, obviously it looks loads better on a screen with more pixels on it!

I suggest you change the quality to 720p and make it full screen for best silky smooth viewing…

Orange tell me that they think this is delivering service.

I bought the mobile from them in good faith, but unfortunately it doesn’t get signal in two places.  My office and my home.

I’ve purchased 2 x signal boosters (about £400 each) in the office, but unfortunately the signal wasn’t strong enough to boost, I’m guessing – either way, they had no impact.

I called Orange.  Told them that I bought the phone in good faith and they sold it in good faith, just unfortunate that it didn’t work.  I offered to send them the money for the ‘phone (they did, after all subsidise it) and I was going to merrily transfer my account to another provider.  No harm done.

A no go apparently.  I then suggested, okay.  Let me take the number off it and put it on another ‘phone and I’ll give this ‘phone to someone else that doesn’t work in the same place as me.  Seemed fair to me, I continue to pay their monthly charge.  Everyone’s a winner.

Three months later I’ve basically given up.  Orange are basically telling me to sod off.  Because I’ve used the ‘phone a lot (which I have, I’m permanently attached to it – everywhere except the office, obviously) they are refusing to do anything.

What is their resolution, you ask.

The only option they are prepared to consider to release my ‘phone number back to me is that I buy out the entire contract (well over £1,000) and they then stop all service.  So in essence, my number’s being held to ransom and the only way out is to pay in full for a service that they are then going to take away from me.

Rest assured that I won’t be using Orange ever again personally, nor will I consider them for our business.

It isn’t the fact that there were issues that bothered me, it’s the way they’ve treated me following that.

I will very shortly be paying this charge.  Apologies to all of you that have been cut off while talking to me over the last three months, or have been unable to get hold of me.

For those that aren’t already aware, Frog recently won the contract to supply a Learning Platform to all 10,000 schools in Malaysia.  Because the technical landscape in Malaysia is slightly different than in the UK, we’ve built a completely new interface to Frog. This latest version of Frog is now already being rolled out to 4 million students and 2 millions parents.

We’ve also been listening carefully to what you’ve been telling us over the last couple of years, and obviously we’ve been learning how we could have done things better over the last 12 years.  While we’ve been developing this new release for Malaysia we’ve made sure that everything we’re learning is going into this release for the UK, too, because if you have a full maintenance agreement with Frog you will be be receiving this upgrade later on this year.  There are still a few bits and pieces we need to do to integrate some elements back in to Frog 3.

Please be assured that we haven’t forgotten about Frog 3.  I’ll be blogging about current developments here too, very shortly.

We’re really proud of what we’ve achieved with the latest version of Frog, which we’ve called Frog4OS (verbally, FrogOS.)

Announcing the world’s first Learning Platform designed specifically for tablet devices (imagine yourself sat in front of your TV with a glass of wine and creating tomorrows learning resources on your iPad, or Android tablet.) Most importantly, this isn’t just a mobile interface, this is a complete application including content creation, that will run on mobile devices – you can even drag and drop widgets in it.  And don’t worry, your Frog 3 built content will run seamlessly inside Frog4OS.

There are loads of other advancements in Frog4OS, too, but I’ll pass those along in a few short sharp blog posts.  I’m sure you all have loads of questions, please fire them at this blog and not my mobile ;)

Folks, this is the beginning of something much, much bigger.  This is just the first step on our future journey.  Frog is about to revolutionise education in a number of different ways.  As ever, thank you to all of our customers that helped us to get here and we look forward to changing lives with you over the next few years.

Here’s a quick video that our friends over in Malaysia created:

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

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.

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….

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?