Archive for June, 2009

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. 

Carnegie Mellon Reappoints Pradeep K. Khosla as Dean of its College of Engineering

Carnegie Mellon University has appointed University Professor Pradeep K. Khosla, the Philip and Marsha Dowd Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and founding director of Carnegie Mellon CyLab, dean of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT) for a second five-year term, effective July 1. 

A Carnegie Mellon alumnus and member of the CIT faculty since 1986, Khosla has invested enormous energy in the success of Carnegie Mellon and its engineering college and has demonstrated his leadership in research and education initiatives both within the university and internationally. Khosla has been CIT dean since 2004.

“Pradeep Khosla has been an outstanding dean who has worked tirelessly to advance the college and its units. During the past five years the number and quality of undergraduate applications has risen to record highs,” said Mark S. Kamlet, Carnegie Mellon provost. “There has also been a 25 percent increase in the number of Ph.D. students in CIT, and an increase of more than 50 percent in the number of women and underrepresented minorities among the graduate student population.”

Under his leadership, CIT was recently ranked sixth in the nation for graduate programs and three of the college’s departments were ranked in the top 10 by U.S. News & World Report. CIT was also ranked sixth in the world by the 2008 London Times Higher Education Supplement. He was instrumental in developing a novel fellowship program that pays for the tuition of first-year Ph.D. students and has reduced the cost for Ph.D. students by 20 percent. He also spearheaded the initiative that brought $29 million into renovating and creating state-of-the-art labs in the Chemical Engineering Department.

Apangea Learning’s Math Tutoring Program to be Offered Through Networks of America

Apangea Learning Inc., just announced that its Apangea Math supplemental learning program used in K-12 schools will now be resold by Education Networks of America (ENA), a leading managed network service provider for school systems, libraries and governments. Apangea said its agreement with ENA represents the first time the company has made one of its services available through a reseller.

Get all of the details right here.

REMOTE DBA EXPERTS, LLC LAUNCHES NEW WEBSITE

Remote DBA Experts LogoCouncil member, Remote DBA Experts, today announced the launch of its new website. The new site boasts several additional features. Check out the press release below: 

Remote DBA Experts, LLC, a leading provider of remote database administration services, announces the release of a newly redesigned company website, http://www.remotedbaexperts.com.

The new site is modern-looking, fast to navigate, and loaded with valuable content.
Potential customers are now able to easily locate information regarding Remote DBA
Experts’ service options, supported database platforms, and unique value proposition. The site’s design enables visitors to easily find the information they need to assess Remote DBA Experts’ approach, expertise, and ability to meet their DBA needs. 

New features available on the Remote DBA Experts website include:

New Layout—new navigation and web sections make it easier for viewers to find the information they need.

Impact video—a 3 minute video that highlights Remote DBA Experts’ approach to remote database administration services and gives potential customers an engaging medium to learn more about their company.

Resource Catalog—a variety of resources such as white papers, case studies, and testimonials that customers can peruse to learn more about Remote DBA Experts.

quickCONTACT box—a contact method that allows potential and current customers to quickly and easily contact Remote DBA Experts anywhere on the site.

About Remote DBA Experts, LLC
Remote DBA Experts, LLC provides remote database administration services for Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and MySQL database environments. The company was founded in 1994 as a Division of Pittsburgh-based Contemporary Technologies, Inc. During the 15 plus years of its history, the company has served hundreds of customers and developed a strong reputation as a great place to work. All remote DBA services are provided directly from the company’s 24×7 Global Operations Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Green Building Alliance Offices Receive LEED Platinum

Green Building Alliance’s (GBA) 3,850-square-foot office space in Pittsburgh’s historic South Side neighborhood has been awarded Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

Located in the River Walk Corporate Centre, GBA’s offices were designed and constructed in 2008 as a model of resource and material efficiency, as well as a green building teaching tool and demonstration project. They serve as an example of how old industrial buildings can be converted into environmentally friendly spaces, and are the first project in Western Pennsylvania to receive USGBC’s highest rating. GBA is also the first USGBC chapter or affiliate to achieve LEED certification for its offices.

Read more about it right here.

GBA will receive a shiny plaque in recognition of its oh so green space tomorrow (6/26) at its office (333 East Carson St.) from 3:30 pm – 5 pm; Media tours by RSVP at 2:45.

RSVP to Karen Puff at karenp@gbapgh.org or (412) 431-0709

MAYA Makes the Pages of Fast Company

Local tech companies have been a roll lately garnering the national spotlight.

ClearCount was profiled in Time Magazine last week and now MAYA Design has made it into Fast Company. It’s a tight profile of the company and how it has pioneered intelligent design. It also details the launch of  MAYA’s Luma Institute, which is teaching its human-centered design to other organizations.  Read the whole thing right here.

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