Marc is organizing a virtual event on Jan. 7, 2010, where he will present the key points for a move to the Silicon Valley, the best place in the world to grow a technology or green startup worldwide.

Don’t miss this event, register online at “Silicon Valley Connect”.

New version of XWiki is very impressive indeed. XWiki moved increasingly in the best worldwide position in the enterprise wiki market, while preserving its open source dimension. The roadmap presented is also very motivating, the direction taken by XWiki is certainly good, because it is outside the framework of pure traditional wiki rather reserved to collaborative writing, to actually go to the real area of collaborative working environments with a new social dimension arriving at high speed.

Examgeneral.com is dedicated to the creation of tests or exams online, whatever their field of activity. You can be a teacher, a school, a university, a business, an administration, in short any structure which needs to create tests or exams online and have taken by students, colleagues, employees , etc … examgeneral.com offers a platform dedicated to the creation and taken of these tests.

By default a easy mode allows you to do everything in one step: creating the exam, retrieving the URL and giving it to who will take the exam. You can also create public exams, which will feed the public database of examgeneral and will enable everyone to take public tests in english, mathematics, and any other idea that you will wish to make it public.

But there is also an expert mode, to be activated in the preferences of the “teacher”, which lets you manage classes, assign examinations for these classes, manage courses themselves divided into various examinations, etc… In short examgeneral.com provides a comprehensive management environment for online test and exam craation, where students and teachers will benefit from sophisticated dashboards to monitor their respective progress.

What’s the difference from the numerous already existing online test websites? First it is an open and free website, professional, and hence the mere creation of online testing, we come to the management of classes, students, statistics, deadlines taken examinations, comparison between results, friends social network, etc … All this for free in its public consumer version, without limits. Will only pay the organizations that manage large-scale multiple classes, professors, students, courses, etc … with specific management tools which will be dedicated to them. But it will be for the next version.

Feel free to visit the site and make it known around you. And if you have any feedback, you can share it with the community of users (it is emerging …).

From the original idea to the launch of the website

We obviously put our web 2.0 expertise in designing and implementing examgeneral.com. In the beginning, a simple idea from the founders. We worked together to brainstorm, formalize, evaluate the implications and how to make participatory the original idea. We have also worked together on the business model to make the project monetizable in the long term.

Then we set up a dedicated development team, led by one of our project managers and build from our high performance development center in China. The achievement has been based on our agile methodology that emphasizes the interactive relationship with the customer and the delivery of iterative versions (very short cycles between 1 and 3 weeks max) to promote the dynamic design and guarante a common vision from the beginning to the end of the project.

It is important also to note that hosting is made on the Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure. It is a know-how we have developed very early at Kimind and that we make available to our customers. The scalability is guaranteed at all times and costs are 100% proportional to the actual consumption of CPU and bandwidth.

First, a private alpha was built, a necessary step because the original idea had no functional specifications and we had everything to build and demonstrate. Then the following versions, like this first beta version, can be realised like packages, now that the functional perimeter is fully well defined. This is one of the forces key points of Kimind to be able to engage in this way on projects from start to finish.

Feel free to contact us directly if you have any questions or needs similar achievements that you would like us to cover.