Knowledge Pills Inc, is a web 2.0 eLearning company. Knowledge Pills Inc develops short, 15 minutes in length, training courses for the corporate market place. Knowledge Pills goal is to provide companies with employee directed courses that can be taken just-in-time throughout the business cycle. Daniel Purlich, CEO of Knowledge Pills, sees his company as a knowledge provider. “Like most people who access an application service, visitors to our site or clients that put our products on their intranet do not want their end users to feel like they are accessing technology.” states Purlich. Employees should be able to search a string of words in their corporate search engine and a Knowledge Pill containing this information should come up. Employees can take a course on what ever device they use without restrictions or needing additional technology that will slow them down. One of the first courses Knowledge Pills built was “Doing Business in China”. There are 450 page books and weeklong seminars on doing business in China. These are necessary for the manager who is moving to China to run an operation. The manager who is flying to China for a two day business trip does not have the desire for this level of breadth and depth of information. What they want is a fifteen minute course that highlights basic courtesies and business etiquette. This type of quick to take course that is focused on long tail subjects, and is of interest to a small specific market, is what Knowledge Pills provides. Knowledge Pills intends to provide short courses on hundreds of subjects that help workers stay in tune and up to date with current issues, trends, and technologies that affect them on a daily basis.

Knowledge Pills has also shook up the traditional sales model. Purlich has been pitched courses to for over 20 years. “I was always frustrated that the course was missing in the sales pitch” says Purlich. Few purchasers of training courses ever take an entire course they purchase; many times they buy courses without ever seeing them. We embrace the modern concept that information should be accessible. With Knowledge Pills, a wide sampling of the training courses we offer are available on the web site. You don't need special passwords to access the training and you can take an entire training course, not just a couple pages that show how pretty the training looks. “ Purlich also believes in enlisting the end user to add value to the training process, wikki's, newsgroups, student comments, and rankings should be part of any training course.

Knowledge Pills are initially available in four languages English, French, Spanish, and German. Eventually courses will be provided in many more languages. Their philosophy is that learners should be able to take courses in the language they are most comfortable learning in. Knowledge Pill plans to have distribution in North America and Europe. The general learner can access the Knowledge Pill web site for free. Most companies want to control their employees learning experience by having courses available through their intranet and by using their LMS. Knowledge Pills has a program where companies can purchase courses and receive additional services including: customization of content, customization of the course look and feel, and custom Knowledge Pills.

Many of Knowledge Pills ideas about type, length, and accessibility of eLearning come from founder Daniel Purlich's experience in the training marketplace. Purlich comes from a traditional training and eLearning background. In the 1990's Daniel was the general manager of France Telecom's training division where he was responsible for identifying corporate training direction, purchasing, and developing initially CBT training and eventually eLearning courses. More recently Purlich was director of content development at Educaterra, the training arm of Telefonica, the second largest telecommunications company. In 2004, Daniel's organization at Educaterra provided 90,000 Telefonica employees with over a million hours of training a year.

Purlich worked closely with managers throughout the organization to understand their needs and requirements. What became quickly apparent was that there was a fundamental change in training that managers were requesting. Managers did not want to take their employees out of the workplace for training. Changes in technology and business operations were happening frequently. Managers needed to be assured that employees were up on these changes. They could not afford to have employees out of the office for days of time. What managers wanted was brief, fifteen minute, training sessions that employees could take anywhere, when the need arose, which provided the employee with the nugget of information that was needed for them to perform their job or be able to participate effectively in a meeting or conference call.

Purlich, realized that for his organization to react to this change they needed to change the size and scope of courses production. Courses needed to be reorganized and prioritized differently. Many cheap to produce, short training courses on subjects that were pertinent today but may not be pertinent in the future needed to be produced. These courses had to work on any resolution monitor, PDA's and cell phones. Managers throughout the organization are happy with the direction training is heading. They realize that classroom training and traditional eLearning will not go away. Quick, cheap, rapid eLearning courses provide them with the necessary training infrastructure employees need to do their job now. These courses are very popular with employees. They allow them to keep up with trends and their workload.

Knowledge Pills and ReadyGo WCB While at Educaterra Purlich was tasked to move over 500 existing courses to the web in less then two years. Using their existing tools and practices it took a team of four developers four to six months to move one course to the web. Purlich realized they needed a new model. That is when Purlich found ReadyGo WCB. With ReadyGo WCB structure, instructional design, and web design are built into the tool. A course that would have taken one of his teams four months to produce took a single course creator a day or two. “I saw the power of fast to produce, quick to take, courses and I realized that there was a big market for these type of courses. ReadyGo is the enabling technology that makes Knowledge Pills viable.” explains Purlich.