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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Online training software takes off

City web-design firm riding hot product

By: Martin Cash

Posted: 08/25/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

Modern Earth Web Design CEO Dan Belhassen, in his Provencher Boulevard office, wants his SmarterU.com product �to be the Google of online training.�

DAN Belhassen has seen a few trends in the digital world come and go, but the founder and CEO of Modern Earth Web Design in Winnipeg has maintained a steady and regular pace of growth.

That might be changing.

It's because one of Modern Earth's spinoffs, SmarterU.com, an online-training software platform his company built, is starting to take off.

"We have very, very aggressive growth plans," Belhassen said. "We want it to be a brand. When people think of online training, we want them to think of SmarterU.com . We want it to be the Google of online training."

Lofty goals indeed.

Business has doubled in 2012 and staff has almost tripled to 13 since the beginning of the year.

Though it has a long way to go yet, Belhassen believes his company may be among the first service providers offering the kind of affordability that will make online training accessible to more than just the largest companies in the world, which had been the case until recently.

Harold Druxerman, can attest to that.

Druxerman, the former Winnipegger who founded Druxy's quick-service delicatessen restaurants with his two brothers 37 years ago in Toronto, had researched online training options for many years.

With the help of SmarterU.com, Druxerman has now established his own online training initiative -- Druxy's University.

"When I was doing my earlier research and Googling the subject to see who some of the players were and doing some of the demo sessions, those other organizations proudly displayed the logos of their clients," Druxerman said.

"It was scary. Predominantly, the logos I was seeing were from multinational organizations, companies like IBM and Shell. There was no way I would possibly trade in that stratosphere. I would not be able to breathe."

He learned about SmarterU.com at a trade show and realized it was the service provider Druxy's was looking for.

Now, franchisees and employees at Druxy's 42 locations in major health-care facilities, office towers and shopping centres throughout Ontario have constant access to a growing number of training modules.

"It's a dandy way of distributing info and getting new stuff to the gang," Druxerman said.

Belhassen had been building online training products for customers for years. But they were treated as one-off custom work in which Modern Earth was paid to produce and deliver the product.

"More and more companies were coming to us wanting some online training for their organization, but they did not have the capital to build it from scratch," he said.

A few years ago, he decided to build SmarterU.com as a cloud-based application.

"That means there is no capital cost for the client, just a monthly subscription fee," Belhassen said. "It makes online training affordable to businesses of all sizes."

Previously, it might have required $50,000 to $100,000 just to get into the game. Now, organizations of any size can take advantage of online training.

Not surprisingly, SmarterU.com is not just a bunch of software designers. Belhassen has a growing staff of training experts who can take a shoebox of PowerPoint, Word documents and YouTube videos and design it into the kind of curriculum the client needs.

Including Druxy's, SmarterU.com has a growing list of high-profile clients of its own, including Standard Chartered Bank of Singapore and the Canadian insurance giant Manulife Financial's travel insurance division.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 25, 2012 B5

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