Below is a letter from Michael Chasen to the client community about the recently announced Blackboard Mobile:
Dear client community,
I'm writing to provide an update on our progress in the mobile realm and to highlight the latest addition to our family of platform solutions, Blackboard MobileTM.
As some of you may remember, back in July we added MobilEdu, a leading suite of campus life applications for mobile devices, to the family of Blackboard solutions. We were also fortunate to bring onboard the team of mobile development experts who built MobilEdu. Together we've been weaving this new solution into our organization and working to flesh out a vision for bringing more parts of the education experience together on the mobile devices we all increasingly rely on.
The result of that work is our newest platform, Blackboard Mobile which will help institutions bring more information students want to the mobile devices they want to use most, starting with the first module in the platform, Mobile Central (formerly MobilEdu). Available now and already in use at nearly 60 institutions in K-12 and Higher Education, Mobile Central allows your institution to put many of its campus resources directly in the hands of your students including course catalogs, maps, a student directory, and campus news.
As we build out the platform vision and future modules, it won't just be us. Like all our platforms, Blackboard Mobile will feature open APIs. So in addition to what we're developing, an emerging community of mobile application developers will be extending the platform in all sorts of interesting ways.
If you're interested in learning more and having a member of our team contact you, access http://www.blackboard.com/Mobile/Contact-Us.aspx or visit our website. In the meantime, we'll keep you posted as we move forward in this fast-evolving area.
And for any clients in North America who are attending the EDUCAUSE conference in Denver next week, we're hosting what should be a really interesting expert panel discussion on mobile strategies in education. Panelists include leaders in mobile from Stanford, MIT and the University of Washington. We hope to see you there.
Sincerely,
Michael Chasen
CEO