Every student gets a MacBook Pro

Apple would not confirm it but I'm pretty sure we are the only online program in the world in which *every* student gets a MacBook Pro. That means that every month we ship hundreds of MacBook Pro all over the US and the world. Here's how we do it.

Making Sense of Diabetes

It's been a while since the last time that I blogged about my relationship with Diabetes. As a person that does not actually have the decease it is often easy to forget how many people in the world are affected and that is one of the reasons for my involvement with the Diabetes Hands Foundation. This amazing organization uses so many innovative ways to reach their goals, it's humbling. A true case study on how the non-profits of the future should operate.

At this point we are conducting one of our online contests. As always, very viral, using the full power of the Internet, our passionate members, and their creative and artistic expression. This has been the signature of the foundation.

Making Sense of Diabetes invites people to submit video in which they express how diabetes have affected their lives challenging them to visually reveal its impact on their lives through one of the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch or smell.

If you are affected by Diabetes in any way, support our contest, participate and ask others to participate as well. 246 million people around the world will thank you.

Social Media Release: Making Sense of Diabetes Video Contest Asks "What Does Diabetes Taste, Smell or Sound Like to You?"

Full Sail Online featured in the Orlando Business Journal

Today we were featured in the Orlando Business Journal. We are very proud to be a successful organization that is adding jobs to the region in a time when most companies are eliminating jobs. This is due to the hard work of so many people that make it their personal business every day to ensure our students are successful. It is an honor to be part of it.

Link to OBJ article: Full Sail program booming

Correlation between the use of social media and financial performance

Recently one of our instructors pointed me to this page where the company WetPaint shows ENGAGEMENTdb, a tool they developed that measures the level of social media engagement of brands.

In specific, they analyzed the most known brands and measured the number of social media channels they use and the level of social engagement in those channels.

With that, they researched the financial performance of those companies to see if they could find a statistical correlation between the two. The result is: There is a correlation.

Keeping in mind that correlation doesn't mean "causation", the finding is nevertheless interesting. Although, not at all that surprising that companies that go out of their way to engage their customers do so much better in their business.

Here's the link to the page and don't forget to download the interesting report: ENGAGEMENTdb

zFlick, very slick app for searching pictures

Bryan Berger, one of our our Web Design and Development students, created zFlick for searching pictures in Flickr. The app was developed in Flash and uses the Adobe AIR desktop runtime. It is very cool! Check out the demo.