Infocow is a social networking portal for young people to find useful online resources. The project was completed on behalf of Futurelab, the educational think-tank.

For much of the latter part of 2008 and early bit of ’09 we were focused on building HTH and making ongoing, iterative improvements to the Beanbag Learning site but as we are rapidly approaching releasing a beta version of HTH to a private group of testers and are now happy with where we are with Beanbag it seems an opportune time to shake things up a little.

We have recruited a talented team here and have decided to occasionally let them see the world outside of the office and to look beyond 3 week Scrum sprints(!) so we are going to start taking on a small amount of work for hire to mix things up a little and refresh everyones creative juices a tad (and lets be frank here, the revenue won’t hurt either!)

We are going to quite selective in the work we take on, utilising the contacts we have built up over the years and focusing on work that fits in with the kind of things we are trying to achieve here at Jiva. This means well engineered ruby-on-rails applications, elegant user focused design, data visualistion and use of Adobe Air to create cross platform desktop applications.

That said it is going to be something of a juggling act and we will have to be vigilant to ensure that we are able to offer the best possible work to any clients while retaining time to work on our own products.

As well as Beanbag and HTH we are also currently working on a number of other projects including Specialise.In which will become our new flagship product this summer and a whole host of projects that have sprung out of our 10% lab time – the first of which Sweet Tweet was released as a Valentine to Twitter. A full list of what we are up to can be found on our Projects page.

There are now seven full-time staff working at Jiva and I think this year is going to be a busy one despite our growth as a company – but it should be interesting!

G3 is a collaboration and project management tool for high end, media rich projects. Built specifically for the needs of the modern, geographically dispersed project. G3 offers the ability to share and collaborate on digital files in one shared space with all the project and audit management tools you would expect alongside custom tools to annotate and collaborate on still photos, video and audio files. We like to think of G3 as Basecamp for film makers. [in the lab]

Bettr was an unconference aimed at start-ups with an education focus organised by Jiva and School of Everything. It took place on the 14th January 2009 and was attended by almost 50 people from a wide range of organisations and at one point was the trending topic on Twitter search. Demos kindly provided the venue and Talis sponsored the event which also coincided with an education focused Social Innovation Camp. The events goal was to create connections between educators and entrepreneurs and to start a discussion on how the social web could benefit learning.

The Social Media Classroom includes a free and open source (Drupal based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes. Integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. The Collaboratory (or Colab), is what we call just the web service part of it. Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMB materials freely, and we host your Colab communities if you don’t want to install your own. Jiva will provide a UK specific hosted solution of SMC. Sign up below to keep up to date with SMC news.