Brainshark Report

Humans have been communicating since before history. Starting with grunts and hand gestures, humankind eventually developed verbal language. The spoken word quickly proved to be an evolutionary advantage, aiding in hunting and the spreading of new ideas. Complex language helped form the first civilizations leading to the creation of written language. The ability to write down ideas meant ideas no longer died with their originator. For the next few thousand years breakthroughs in the field of communication were improvements to these forms of communication. The printing press made access to the written word more ubiquitous as did radio and television do for the spoken word. Then came the era of personal computing and the internet. The internet made it possible for people across the word to share ideas in the form of written documents, audio files, and video clips. This was a big leap forward in communication, but not without its drawbacks. The main drawback was organization. While creating and sharing individual files was easy enough, compiling files into a suit of related text and video was difficult, and tracking the engagement with those files was impossible. Then in 1999, Joe Gustafson founded a company called Brainshark. Brainshark aids communication by allowing a company to create a suit of sales presentations, access those presentations form any device, and gauge the effectiveness of those presentations.

On a basic level both verbal and written communication have strengths and weaknesses that are made up for with Brainshark technology. Verbal communication biggest strength is speed. Almost as quickly as a person comes up with ideas those ideas can be expressed verbally. This prompts immediate feedback and leads to a quick exchange. This is good for informal or emergent information, but leaves something to be desired in a more formal setting. Verbal communication lacks permanence. A word spoken lives only in the audience’s memory. This can be inconvenient when the information needs to be accessed again in the future as human memories didn’t evolve to hold unaltered information long term. This leads to miscommunications as different parties often have different memories of the same conversation, leading to the degrading of information. Written communication makes up for many of the shortfalls of verbal communication. Most importantly, written communication is significantly longer lasting and more accurate than verbal communication. With a written document, any disagreement as to the content of the message can be resolved simply by referencing the source material. Despite being more reliable, written communication has its weaknesses. The most limiting weakness is the fact that both parties need to be able to both read and write in the same language, a much harder skill to learn than talking, in order for the message to be received. The written word also discourages quick feedback as the writing process is long relative to speaking and the author is not always in the same vicinity as their writing. Brainshark’s technology overcomes the majority of both written and verbal communication’s weaknesses. With the Brainshark platform a user can create video of sales presentations and send them to potential clients. This solves the permanence problem of the spoken word while also keeping intact all the strengths of verbal communication.

Brainshark not only compensates for the weaknesses of verbal communication, but aids in every step of the communication process. To understand how it does this one must first understand the communication process. The communication process is broken down into four main steps: Encoding information, selecting the channel of communication, transferring the information, and decoding the information. Brainshark helps encoding information by easily transforming static content like PowerPoints and PDFS into voice-enriched interactive