deeplocal Chalkbot to Make a Mark at the Tour de France

The world’s greatest bike race kicks off this weekend and Pittsburgh tech company deeplocal is making it more interactive with its Chalkbot.

Yes, the Tour de France starts on July 4 :-) and now you can text a  message to be written on the roads of the Tour’s many stages. It’s all part of Nike LIVESTRONG and Lance Armstrong’s on-going cancer awareness campaign.

Click here to see how it works. deeplocal CEO Nathan Martin says the Chalkbot is receiving about 200 texts a day so far. The road is open. What will you say?

Redefining the Power of Democracy…One Click at a Time

On July 4, 2009, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the founding of MyGov365 will be formally announced when the Declaration of MyGov365 (www.MyGov365.com)  is offered to the American citizens via the internet. A mere 300 miles away from Philadelphia across the state and 233 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, Pittsburgh welcomes the announcement of the Declaration of MyGov365.MyGov365 Logo

MyGov365 provides a social media platform to bridge the communication gaps between Citizens, Government, and Political Professionals. As a universal destination to access information related to politics, civics, and government, MyGov365 provides citizen, government, and political professional users with a powerful suite of tools to engage elected officials, constituents, and stakeholders; creating a 24/7-365 day a year feedback loop to enhance the legislative and civic process on all levels: local, state, and federal.

Founder and President, Jay Resio, envisions MyGov365.com as a “non-partisan tool to empower the average Joe or Jane Citizen to become engaged in the civic process on all levels of government and restore the belief that it is our government, not just in election years and not just in the voting booth, but all 365 days of the year, as evident by the name MyGov365.” Resio also believes the power of their unique social media platform complete with Social Polling™ will provide invaluable reporting to elected officials, campaigns and other professional users.

Founded on the belief that it is our government, 24/7-365 days a year, MyGov365 endeavors to inform the public, inspire citizens to participate, to engage elected officials and make transparent their legislative efforts, and provide virtual soapboxes and town hall forums for concerned citizens to voice their opinions and participate in their government every day of the year.
The American people are invited to join in the founding of MyGov365 by signing the virtual Declaration of MyGov365. Visit www.declarationofmygov365.com on July 4, 2009 at 12:00 noon EST.

Direct Energy Business to Green City of Pittsburgh for G-20 Summit

Direct Energy Business, one of North America’s leading commercial and industrial energy retail suppliers, announced it plans to green the electricity usage of the city of Pittsburgh  for both days of the G-20 Summit by securing Green-e Energy certified Renewable Energy Credits, or RECs, generated from renewable energy sources located in Pennsylvania and Texas.

“Pittsburgh will be on the world stage as we host the G-20 Summit,” said Maura Clark, president of Direct Energy Business. “We wanted to do something to further demonstrate the fact that Pittsburgh is a city at the forefront of leveraging alternate energy sources to promote economic stability. Direct Energy Business recognizes that protecting the environment through sustainable business practices such as investing in renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency strategies have become essential for today’s businesses.”

Direct Energy Business will calculate the amount of independently verified RECs required to green Pittsburgh on September 24th and 25th based on electricity usage data provided by local utility, Duquesne Light Company.  Direct Energy Business will offset the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the electricity used in the City through the permanent retirement of Green-e Energy certified RECs.

Tom Saunders, president and CEO of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, said, “As an organization dedicated to greening Pittsburgh through community gardens and the TreeVitalize program, and that supports renewable energy, we are very pleased to see Direct Energy Business take this step to ‘green’ the city during the G-20 summit.”

This greening program follows last month’s media event hosted by Direct Energy Business featuring state leaders, including Governor Edward G. Rendell, where the Company announced its five-year, $2.5 million Committed To Pennsylvania initiative and its expanded Pennsylvania operations; more information is available at www.committedtopa.com.

Dr. Alan Miciak, Dean of the John F. Donahue School of Business at Duquesne University, and creator of the school’s globally ranked Sustainability MBA, is also pleased to see the blending of renewables with the G-20 Summit. “We created our Sustainability MBA to incorporate the bedrock elements of ethics and fiscal responsibility into a program with environmental and human capital considered part of the bottom line,” noted Miciak. “It’s heartening to see Direct Energy Business connect the same dots with their global-impact renewable efforts.”

Direct Energy Business is currently assisting over 1,000 organizations across the Commonwealth in taking control of their energy costs and has more Pennsylvania-based employees than any other competitive retail energy supplier. “We are committed to helping other businesses succeed by offering competitive electricity and related services to small, medium and large-sized organizations in Pennsylvania,” added Ms. Clark. “We are thrilled that an international audience will see the reasons Direct Energy Business chose Pittsburgh as our North American headquarters.”

Tell PA Legislators What You Think About the State Budget

Governor Ed Rendell has proposed some serious business tax increases for next year’s State Budget. Despite receiving billions of dollars in federal economic stimulus funding, he’s still proposing a big  increase that will directly impact Pennsylvania technology companies.

The Pittsburgh Technology Council has made it easy to tell your elected officials what you think through our enhanced government relations section of our Web site.

Click hear to have your voice heard! Power to the people!

Concurrent Technologies Corporation Wins $49 Million, 5-Year Air Force Contract

Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC) has been awarded a five-year Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract worth up to $49 million by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, for a research and development program entitled “Environmental and Energy Quality Technologies.” Concurrent Tech Logo

According to Edward J. Sheehan, Jr., CTC’s President & Chief Executive Officer, “The contract awarded by the U.S. Air Force Research Lab is a follow-on contract to existing work.  CTC is proud to have won this contract award in open competition.  The contract is an IDIQ contract vehicle, which means that it is not funded at $49 million, but will be funded as tasks are awarded.  The first funded task order under this IDIQ is an advanced laser coatings removal development project valued at $5.1 million. 

“We are pleased to continue our service to the U.S. Air Force through this contract.  This five year contract award is evidence of the Air Force’s confidence in our work and ability to deliver quality solutions to important energy and environmental issues.” 

Under this contract, CTC and its team of small and large businesses are expected to transition emerging materials, processes and new technologies to reduce and eliminate toxic and hazardous chemicals, materials, and waste streams, while improving energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions for the U.S. Air Force.  Specific types of technology areas that will be assessed under this contract include advanced materials and processes that improve the Air Force’s environmental and energy footprint including assessment and validation of alternative energy technology and alternative fuels, reduction and elimination of hazardous materials, environmental assessments, lifecycle assessments, and industrial base process improvements that reduce costs.

New Emergency Notification Platform Wins Prestigious Innovation Award

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has been awarded the Technology Innovator of the Year honors for its work in evaluating, testing and implementing a new emergency warning
system. The award, issued annually by Campus Technology Magazine, recognizes the university’sMetis Secure Logo
implementation of the Metis Secure emergency notification platform developed by Metis Secure Solutions of Oakmont, PA – the nation’s leading provider of location-based warning systems. The Metis Secure system, a faster and more accurate method of emergency notification, is scheduled to be installed at Mellon Institute on the CMU campus later this year.

The Campus Technology Innovators Award recognizes higher education institutions and their vendor partners that have pursued, and successfully launched, initiatives that reach beyond today’s IT applications to create tomorrow’s educational technology practices—serving as models to other institutions seeking best-of- breed information to help them meet their own campus challenges.

“We congratulate these leading colleges and universities, their project teams and solution providers for their vision and leadership, and for pushing the envelope by taking their technology investments to new heights,” says Wendy LaDuke, President and Group Publisher of 1105 Media’s Education Group.

“We are truly honored that CMU and Metis Secure have been recognized for this prestigious award,” said Mark Kurtzrock, CEO of Metis Secure Solutions. “The staff of the Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) department at CMU is to be commended for having the vision and commitment to seek a better way to protect their students in times of crisis. Our work together at Mellon Institute represents a turning point in creating a better solution to get the right message to the right place at the right time during an emergency. ”

According to Madelyn Miller, Director of CMU’s EH&S department, the Metis Secure system is
revolutionary in terms of emergency notification. “The Metis system provides a level of location targeting, message speed and redundancy that we have not seen in other systems. In addition, the call for help communications adds a dimension that no other system provides. We are proud to have been part of making this innovative solution a reality for all universities.”

This year’s winning projects will be featured in the August issue of Campus Technology magazine, and will receive in-depth coverage on CampusTechnology.com, as well as be spotlighted at the Campus Technology 2009 conference, held July 27 – 30 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in Boston, Mass.

Metis Secure Solutions was launched in 2008 as a new business dedicated to designing, manufacturing and distributing a unique emergency warning platform that can be used in a wide range of settings such as colleges and universities. Unmatched reliability, speed and ease-of-use are integral to the Metis Secure Solution notification platform, including its proprietary combination of two independent wireless data paths to deliver and receive messages. In combination, these features make Metis Secure a superior solution with major advantages over every other emergency notification platform in the market.

Check out Metis Secure at www.metissecure.com or read about the company in the most recent TEQ magazine http://www.pghtech.org/news-and-publications/teq/article.aspx?Article=1949

Nurses Replace Clipboards with Headsets to Document their Work

Butler Memorial Hospital has won the nationally recognized Nursing Information Technology Innovation Award sponsored by Health Data Management and CARING. Vocollect Inc. engaged Bright Innovation to help create an award winning new way for nurses to work at Butler Memorial Hospital.Bright Innovation Logo

Registered nurses are one of the most essential, yet costly, expenses for a hospital. The Bright team conducted several months of field research and group interviews to help Vocollect develop and create a wireless hands-free and eyes-free system for IV nurses. This new system will reduce infections, decrease paperwork, ease communication, increase the time nurses spend treating patients and improve workflow among the nursing staff.

Vocollect hired Bright Innovation to determine if their products and capabilities could improve the lives of IV team nurses and their patients. Bright Innovation shadowed nurses while they did their jobs, created simulations and conducted interviews in order to get a solid understanding of how the IV team members did their job and their most important needs. Using these interactive and observational tools, Bright Innovation found ways to improve data management, communication, and task management.

The system will save time, paperwork and effort for IV nurses. Minimizing administrative duties leaves more time to devote to patient care. The system reduces errors by giving nurses the ability to completely document their tasks, eliminating time and stress spent recording notes manually. According to Health Data Management Magazine:

By using the new technology, IV nurses completely documented their tasks in the clinical information system 100% of the time, compared with 40% using the old, more manual process, says Cindy Esser, R.N., director of emerging technologies. This more complete data will help the hospital’s efforts to conduct research on the cause of IV complications, including infections.

About the Award:
This is the fourth year that Health Data Management has sponsored the Nursing Information Technology Innovation Award competition. The co-sponsor is CARING, a national nursing informatics association.

The award recognizes a team of nursing professionals at a hospital, clinic or other care giving site. It recognizes innovation and excellence in using information technology to directly improve the quality of care or promote the effective use of nursing resources.

About Bright Innovation: Bright Innovation is dedicated to collaborating with companies to bring out their fullest potential. The company is committed to taking an idea, creating a product, and crafting a need among prospective customers. Bright Innovation employs a distinct recipe of qualitative and quantitative design research tools to solve complex problems surrounding people’s interaction with products and services. With a mix of user research, market development, product design, technological design, and service design, Bright Innovation is determined to reveal the greatest value a company can acquire from its markets, customers, and products. If you are interested in more information or achieving these goals please contact us at info@bright-innovation.com.

Quality of Life Technology Center Enters New Collaboration

Carnegie Mellon’s Quality of Life Technology Center (QoLT) entered into a collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh and TravellingWave, a deveoper of next-generation multimodal input technology, to develop advanced speech solutions for products – including robotic mobility assistants – for the elderly and disabled.

The CMU and U. of Pittsburgh teams will collaborate with TravellingWave under a grant-award provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Small Business Investigation Research (SBIR) supplemental awards program. 

TravellingWave’s VoicePredict™ product – which combines voice recognition with text prediction- enables users to switch between keyboard input and speech input with near-100% task-completion accuracy. 

Dr. Daniel P. Siewiorek, director of the CMU Human-Computer Interaction Institute who heads up the QoLT research in Human-System Interaction, will direct the work on the project, which marks the first commercial integration for TravellingWave’s VoicePredict.  VoicePredict will release a beta version of its product in the coming months.

Virtual Edge to Help Launch New International Pharmaceutical Company

New Virtual Edge graphicVirtual Edge Collaborative, an alternative to U.S. and Pittsburgh advertising agencies, marketing companies, marketing firms, marketing agencies, web design companies and graphic design companies, has been hired by PharmaCorp, a newly created international pharmaceutical company with locations in the USA, UAE and Uganda.

Founded in 2008, PharmaCorp is a pharmaceutical supply chain solutions provider of products, services and information to the healthcare industry. It has offices and business operations in Boston, USA, Sharjah, UAE and Kampala, Uganda. PharmaCorp’s core businesses include the sourcing, procurement, warehousing, distribution and marketing of generic prescription and over-the-counter human pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, medical devices and surgical supplies. In addition, PharmaCorp is an information intermediary between various touch points along the supply value chain, including manufacturers, third-party logistics providers and healthcare providers and their patients.

First projects that Virtual Edge Collaborative will complete for the initial launch phase will encompass the development of the company’s first logo and matching identity materials, as well as a capabilities brochure and PowerPoint presentation for marketing and sales support purposes.

“As a new business, getting our brand image, corporate identity and initial marketing materials right the first time was one of the first critical decisions we had to make. We were looking for a marketing partner who was not only interested in obtaining our business, but helping us build and grow it for the long-term. After talking to a number of marketing firms, Virtual Edge Collaborative really stood out. Their willingness to listen to our needs before offering professional advice, upfront pricing, impressive portfolio of work, knowledge and forthcoming demeanor was both refreshing and rare,” said Dr. Andrew Mulindwa, Chairman and CEO.

Recap: Pittsburgh’s 2009 Search Marketing Day

It’s been a little more than six weeks since Search Marketing Day came to Pittsburgh. (Where is the summer going?) Frank McDade of IMPAQT has a quick little recap from the ground-breaking event. Check it out:

IMPAQT, a Search Marketing agency, co-hosted the second Search Marketing Day alongside the Pittsburgh Technology Council on May 13. The event introduced the exchange of Search Marketing information between marketing professionals of nationally recognized and Pittsburgh-based companies.

The day began with a keynote address presented by Geoff Ramsey, Co-Founder and CEO of eMarkter, who discussed the current state of the economy and the effect of the recession on the Search Marketing industry. Attendees chose between ‘tracks’ that pertained to Search Marketing Fluency, Online Content and its role in Search, and making decisions based off of the data that is generated from Search.  Each attendee was directed to four different sessions with topics that spanned Organic and Paid Search, Data Sources, Structural SEO, Search Engine Functionality, Online Marketing Strategies, Monetization, and Search Analytics. A keynote lunch followed the first two sessions and featured representatives of Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. View the complete video catalog of Search Marketing Day, courtesy of Panopto.

The day concluded with a networking reception that allowed many of Pittsburgh’s most influential Search Marketers the opportunity to mingle and share ideas. Overall, the day was a great success and undoubtedly lent well to the exchange of Search Marketing knowledge in the Pittsburgh area.

If you attended the event, please feel free to start a discussion and share your experience with those who could not attend in the Search Marketing Day 2009 LinkedIn group.

For complete access to all presentations, photographs, and archived tweets, please view the Search Marketing Day page on www.IMPAQT.com. 

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