Wednesday, February 25, 2009









BrainStorm is an educational website used for e-business at the same time as a resource provider. The website provides software training services with certain attached costs. Although it is not a very frequently visited sites by most internet users (not included in top 100,000 according to Alexa), it is a very unique and useful website to big businesses and organizations. Their target users are organizations who wish to upgrade their users. Industries such as automotive, business to business, computer and technology, education, arts and entertainment, financial and government are the major users of this website.





The prime objective of BrainStorm is to offer the best software training courses with master instructors, training materials, hands-on training and customized curriculum that are designed to fit the needs of the organization.

a) Increasing the eagerness of users and learners- Things that the training does are to increase eagerness of end-users, make them actually remember what they have learned and personalize their experience. BrainStorm's master instructors know every aspect of the programs they teach, their excitement about the new features will influence users thus users will be eager for the software roll-out.

b) Follow up computer training- Under traditional training, students only remember a little more than half of what they learned. A day after training, retention levels fall even lower. However, users remember more of what they learned using BrainStorm’s on-site, hands-on corporate computer training because they actually performed tasks that they would be performing in reality.

c) proper topic selection- To make on-site training even more efficient for the users, BrainStorm lets the organization decide what the end-users need to learn. The organization will choose topics it wants for the trainer to focus on and which ones it wants him to leave out completely.

d) software education - There are different types of software training products that the website offers designed for all types of customers and software providers. These training products and services can teach the organization and its users how to get the most out of their Microsoft, Novell, Corel, OpenOffice.org, or other custom software.




The website gives software and on-site training programs for enterprises. The hands-on computer training provided by BrainStorm enables people who have undergone training to increase productivity by having the capacity to maximize the utility of the software they have at work. After the training, the employee may already be aware of the advantages and be able to perform the task in a more efficient and productive manner. Besides the increase in productivity, the opportunity cost of training the employees decreases because of the reduced time that is needed for training. This could be allotted for other activities such as their main work or other projects. The two reasons we have indicated above may contribute greatly to the increase in productivity and further increase revenues of a company. Some of the life examples are United States Pharmacopeia, New York State Education Department, and US Department of Justice.

Aside from providing IT training and creating efficient work force for interested companies and individuals, BrainStorm also is a place for employment. It currently seeks individuals for various positions such as IT Systems Engineer, Internet Marketing Analyst, and Sales Associates. It has unique descriptions for the qualifications for the said positions but it all boils down to the need of forming the best team of employees because having excellent employees leads to having an excellent company.


Pros:
§ It is organized enough and it really caters to the need of the end-users by making available of materials that will cater to the learning of a user. This includes training, e-materials, workbooks and quick start card.
§ It has abundant application for end-users to choose.
§ Productivity of employees will be further enhanced and they may develop a faster way of working to save time and effort
§ In addition, contact information is disclosed in case there are questions needed to be entertained.

Cons:
§ The software and applications are expensive. Everything has a price. An employee for example may just want to ask for assistance from his/her co-employee instead of utilizing this service. Besides, workbooks can also be generated from online document sharing websites (ex. Scribd) wherein it’s free to download them.
§ The website itself does not contain a feedback portion where comments and questions of end-users should be written. This is very important since they are self-acclaimed providers therefore, opinions of users should be disclosed too.
§ Advertisement should be improved. The users of the website usually come from developed countries like USA and Australia but very few from Asia.
§ Moreover, high-class institutions (i.e. New York Education Department and the US Department of Justice While) were the only ones who made positive comments. We notice that at least very few of institutions that aren’t highly recognized made comments or used this training program. This is maybe because of its expensive features and services. IT may also because of digital divide. Not everybody has access to internet and not everybody has an extra budget to sustain this service.

5 comments:

  1. Electronica: I would have to rank this website review as the second easiest review to comprehend! It's not text-heavy at all. The information is organized and structured properly. Aside from that, it was nice that you placed headings/titles to organize your data!

    Kudos.

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  2. (99 Stars)

    Good review!

    I have to agree with Reyneil that this review is easy to comprehend. Its very informative of what Brainstorm is and reading it is not dragging at all. Good job in making the review very concise and straight to the point without sacrificing any important details. The pros and cons also have been very useful in this review that any reader would be able to really weigh the benefits of Brainstorm.

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  3. when i was about to post my comment here, I was surprised that what i would like to say were actually what reyneil and carlos have said. i really have to agree with them. this one is easy to understand. yey! it's not that dragging.:) sorry, but i have to admit that the previous reviews are kind of boring. the groups could have done something to make those more pleasing and interesting to the readers.

    this website is really helpful, especially to us, Business Economics majors.

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  4. I agree with Reyneil, Carlos, and Juice. The review is truly informative and constructive. It is easy to comprehend and helpful for comparison purposes.

    Moreover, it's good that you noticed some things not right about the site: the comments, the feedback portion.

    Good job!

    [Matri-6]

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  5. I would really agree to what others have said about this review. It was really really easy to comprehend and it wasn't. the questions I had as I was reading the review was answered on the critique part. Excellent review!!!

    For the site, it was an interesting site. The guidelines followed by the site on how they should teach the different applications must also be followed in the school so that students will never get bored going to their classes. They will always look forward to their subjects.

    (team one-derful)

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