Wimba

» see wimba.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Wimba started in Paris. Hugues Pisapia and Tommaso Trionfi founded Wimba S.A. in 1998 around one narrow idea: a web page should be able to record and play back a human voice, and a language teacher should be able to set that up without an engineer. That is a smaller ambition than most 1998 startups had, and it is the reason the company was still alive in 2010 when most of its cohort was not.

The voice tools were the whole product for years. Voice Board was a discussion forum where the posts were recordings instead of text, so a Spanish class could argue about a film in Spanish and the instructor could hear the accents. Voice Podcaster pushed those same recordings out as audio files, and Voice Presentation put narration over slides. None of it looked impressive in a screenshot, which is probably why almost nobody outside a university ever saw it.

On 14 June 2004 the French company completed a merger with HorizonLive.com, a New York outfit selling live virtual classrooms to higher education. The combined company was called Horizon Wimba, Trionfi took the chief executive job, and the head office moved to New York. Over the next few years it bought Brownstone Research Group and the UK training company Connected Learning, then dropped the Horizon and went back to being Wimba with a full suite behind the name. Classroom ran the live sessions and Pronto handled instant messaging, with a utility called Create that turned Word documents into course pages.

By 2010 the customer list ran past 700 K-12 and post-secondary institutions in 28 countries. That was enough to make it worth buying and not enough to make it worth keeping.

~ the record ~

~ bought in a pair ~

On 7 July 2010 Blackboard announced it had agreements to acquire both Wimba and Elluminate, roughly $116 million in cash for the two together. The press release framed it as a new standalone platform, Blackboard Collaborate, built from the best of both companies. Blackboard had just bought its two closest competitors in the same morning.

Collaborate shipped as Elluminate Live! with a new badge on it. Wimba Classroom kept running alongside for a while because the contracts said it had to, but there was no version of the roadmap where two live-classroom products from the same vendor both survived.

~ the part i was not in the room for ~

I was a university student in Turkey through most of the years Wimba was selling. Software a university buys is invisible to the students who are not forced into it, and Wimba was never forced onto me. The chat that mattered in my building was MSN, running on machines that had nothing to do with any courseware budget. Wimba's customer was a procurement committee in a country I was not in. Its French origin does not shorten that distance by much.

~ the wind-down ~

Blackboard published the end-of-life schedule in 2013. From 1 August 2014 you could not create a new Wimba Classroom session at all. Institutions posted their own migration notices through that year, and the University of Georgia's version is typical: Collaborate becomes the supported tool, and instructors have until 19 December 2014 to download their archived Wimba sessions before they go. Support for the product ended with the year.

The Voice tools outlasted the classroom by a while, still bolted into learning management systems at schools that had bought them, quietly running Spanish assignments long after the company was a line item in someone's integration plan. wimba.com started returning redirects in 2017 and stopped resolving entirely a few years after that.

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