Hot Lava Mobile enables you to reach, train and communicate with your mobile workforce and on-the-go employees, partners, and customers. Hot Lava Mobile provides the ability to develop and deliver a variety of content and analyze results in support of corporate communications and mobile learning. It was the winner of eLearning! Magazine’s Readership Award for ‘Best Mobile Learning Solution’ in each of the last two years.

I spoke with Mike Gregory from OutStart about its capabilities.  The tool was acquired in 2009 as part of the plan to expand their Knowledge Solutions offerings. I covered another component of these offerings in the post, OutStart’s Participate Supports the Social Side of Enterprise Work Processes. As a disclosure I am now working with OutStart on their social media efforts.

OutStart saw the rising capabilities of mobile devices as they progressed from being simple phones to becoming hand held computers with multiple capabilities. It also saw the increasing interest and potential of connecting to these powerful, always available, always connected devices. This makes a lot of sense to me.

OutStart wanted a tool that was simple to use and was flexible enough to support a variety of use cases. Security was another concern, as was the ability to effectively handle audio and video. In addition, they wanted a tool that would operate on most, if not all, of the expanding number of mobile devices without any modifications. They wanted the ability for the tool to adjust messages to the many different screen sizes, resolution settings, and power within mobile devices.  Hot Lava Mobile effectively addressed all these issues. You create the content, and the technology figures out how to get to play properly on the many different mobile devices.

To create new content you can leverage the familiar PowerPoint environment to quickly develop mobile content once for deployment over 500 different internet-enabled mobile devices without the need for customization. There are many Hot Lava Mobile extensions to PowerPoint support the development of quizzes, polls, and assessments. Below you can see a PowerPoint being used to create a message.

Hot Lava Mobile also enables use of numerous content elements including rich audio and video, and Flash. With the ability to interact with users, enable instant feedback, reporting, and measurement you see how the content was received, read and understood. Hot Lava Mobile is a SaaS offering.

Here is an example of the capabilities within Hot Lava Mobile. A global insurance company used mobile learning as a way of reaching its workforce in a crisis situation. Polls were first sent to workers to gauge the situation to determine proper response. This secured engagement, as well as relevancy. Once assessed, information was then sent to workers in the form of text messages, audio, video, diagrams, and job aids such as check lists. A sample is shown below.

In each instance, real-time reporting ensured everyone had completed the poll, read instructions, taken training or simulations, passed assessments, and actually used the material on the job. You can see a sample assessment summary below.

A post-crisis mobile survey indicated that emergency workers were able to assess damage 20% faster than in previous crisis situations.  This translates into cost savings to both the company and their subscribers. This case used the polling, multi-channel delivery, and assessment functions within Hot Lava.

Here are some other examples: change management, employee engagement, and learning reinforcement.