Design Success with Pinpoint

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Have you ever faced a situation where you attempted to solve a problem but felt the need for a fresh new set of eyes to view the situation in a different light?

Pinpoint can be that fresh set of eyes for you to discover new and improved solutions to your business problems.

This dedicated and professional team located in Portland, OR, was founded in 2005 but already helps many large clients such as Cisco, Nike, and Intel, et. al.

Being experts in design and strategy primarily, Pinpoint can see solutions to your problems that you may have never considered.

Pinpoint takes your business seriously and studies your operations, techniques, and systems inside and out to know your company and customers while strategically finding the answers to your most complicated questions before moving you forward. Journey Mapping is just one such useful service provided.

Pinpoint will research new markets and areas of potential growth to let you know how to best proceed with your business endeavors. Maximizing efficiency and profits are two of the great benefits to using Pinpoint as a business partner.

On another note, have you ever sat down and thought about what it may be like to be one of your own customers? Pinpoint can walk you through the customer’s journey with an orthogonal view of your company.

Overall I think most of us know that a business strategy is just as important as the products or services that you are selling. Let the professionals at Pinpoint show you the way.

Design Success with Pinpoint

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Have you ever faced a situation where you attempted to solve a problem but felt the need for a fresh new set of eyes to view the situation in a different light?

Pinpoint can be that fresh set of eyes for you to discover new and improved solutions to your business problems.

This dedicated and professional team located in Portland, OR, was founded in 2005 but already helps many large clients such as Cisco, Nike, and Intel, et. al.

Being experts in design and strategy primarily, Pinpoint can see solutions to your problems that you may have never considered.

Pinpoint takes your business seriously and studies your operations, techniques, and systems inside and out to know your company and customers while strategically finding the answers to your most complicated questions before moving you forward. Journey Mapping is just one such useful service provided.

Pinpoint will research new markets and areas of potential growth to let you know how to best proceed with your business endeavors. Maximizing efficiency and profits are two of the great benefits to using Pinpoint as a business partner.

On another note, have you ever sat down and thought about what it may be like to be one of your own customers? Pinpoint can walk you through the customer’s journey with an orthogonal view of your company.

Overall I think most of us know that a business strategy is just as important as the products or services that you are selling. Let the professionals at Pinpoint show you the way.

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Compute. Compete. Capitalize.

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USAID is “Feeding the Future”

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The U.S. has been a leader in global aid efforts and reform initiatives for decades now.

By 2050 there will be about 9 billion mouths to feed which means we have to double our current food production to compensate.

world_hunger

After the extreme increase in food costs in 2007-2008, President Obama decided to take action to begin helping the 800 million people who suffer from hunger.

Since the launch of Feeding the Future Initiative backed by the government in 2010, the impact of the educational efforts and time spent changing lives by U.S organizations has shown substantial benefits in so many countries.

Now, USAID faces the never-ending challenge of helping to reduce the amount of people who have to go to bed hungry every night as well as the number of children facing malnutrition.

The primary problem? World hunger. The solution? Access to adequate farming resources and knowledge of better crop-growing practices and the development of small and mid-sized agriculture businesses worldwide.

USDA is also helping USAID in the allocation of resources to those in need. The USDA has helped train more than 145,000 farmers and small to mid-sized food producers on new and improved methods of farming and food safety practices.

Thanks to Feed the Future Initiative, we now see countries like Zambia, Ethiopia, Honduras, and Tanzania (to name a few),  producing up to 32% more crops to feed their people.

ChalkLabs currently offers solutions to farmers in need of technology to track weather information, improve crop yield, and show where they are wasting resources among many other benefits within the overall knowledge of your business endeavors.

If you would like to see all of the recent details from the recent year on the USAID website, please visit the link below.

Feed the Future Fact Sheet

(usaid.gov)

ChalkLabs Website

Turn Big Data into Big ROI – Advantages of Pushgraph PaaS

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Now that Cloud storage has been declared mainstream, some industries are capitalizing on Big Data technologies. A natural next step is to turn “Big Data” into “Big ROI”. One difficulty of this transition is to choose the tool that will deliver fast and flexible services to be easily utilized by your employees. Welcome to Pushgraph.

Active benefits of Pushgraph include: (a) visual and predictive analytics, (b) highly compacted semantic search capability, and (c) true in-memory computing – no SSD disk necessary.

Pushgraph PaaS solution also matches or exceeds the performance of larger and more costly Big Data platforms such as SAP’s HANA and Oracle’s TimesTen platforms.

Pushgraph customers range from government agencies to universities to medical research organizations, et. al. The National Multiple Sclerosis Society and the USDA are two current clients using Pushgraph to save large amounts of time and money.

One Return on Investment (ROI) estimate for Pushgraph by a public sector customer for a common type of data request between public sector organizations was 2083%. The time savings for using Pushgraph instead of existing tools for each type of this request was 7 hours. Another ROI estimate for Pushgraph regarding identification of potentially overlapping research projects will result in a potential annual cost savings of $240,000.”

Security is also a big concern among Big Data customers today. Pushgraph complies with many government and industry standards such as: 1) PCI Level 1, 2) Fips 140-2, 3) ITAR, 4) ISO 27001, 5) SSAE 16/32, 6) MPAA aligned.

The next generation of intelligent computing is here and at your fingertips. Visit ChalkLabs.com for Pushgraph benchmarks and metrics, our major clients, and a free live demonstration.

Below is a link to the performance and security data for Pushgraph –  http://bit.ly/1tNqmWd

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Benefits of Cloud-Computing Adoption by Government Agencies

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Data within private networks will soon be a thing of the past for United States Government agencies. Cloud adoption is sweeping the nation as the old world of data storage seems to dissipate. The government Cloud-Computing Technology Road Map outlines the policies in place that will hopefully accelerate Cloud usage among the many sectors of our government.

Photo credit- Wired.com and NIST.gov

Photo credit – Cloudtimes.org

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is in full support of the outline of “secure and effective adoption of the Cloud-Computing model to reduce costs and improve services,” as quoted off of their website.

Suggestions for policies back in November 2011 were provided by folks from hundreds of organizations and stake holders as well as private experts and CIO’s.

Imagine the flexibility that an estimated seven percent off of the annual I.T. budget will provide the government as a result of Cloud migration from on-premise systems.

Accountability, documentation, better decision-making based on fact, protection of the public’s rights, and improvement in operations are all among the benefits seen with Cloud adoption. Savings and efficiency are obvious and well-known up-sides to using the Cloud as well. Visions of triggering innovation in the I.T. sector of the government are in the sights of leaders as they embark upon a brand new age of technology.

So how might these benefits be obtained? Amazon Web Services is a well-known provider of GovCloud services which adhere to FedRAMP standards and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). As an AWS gold member, ChalkLabs can host applications in a secure and reliable Cloud provider. Yet data within a Cloud is useless without a platform such as Pushgraph to analyze and visualize the information at hand. Data can then transform into powerful predictive insights, competitive advantages and substantial savings.  Visit ChalkLabs.com to see who already has a competitive edge via Cloud services and Pushgraph PaaS.

(forbes.com)(wired.com)(nist.gov)(whitehouse.gov)

ChalkLabs Awarded one of “20 Most Powerful Big Data Solution Providers”

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ChalkLabs was recently named one of “20 Most Powerful Big Data Solution Providers” by CIOStory.com.

Discover how ChalkLabs Big Data Platform Pushgraph is saving government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and disease research organizations time and money while increasing ROI.

If you would like to download the complete copy of CIO Story Big Data Special 2014, feel free to share the link below.

http://ciostory.com/magazine/September-2014/BigData20/

ChalkLabs: Carrier-Agnostic Logistics Solutions

How can we make our City Smarter?

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Technology continues to fuel population growth with new applications targeting Big Data analytics and data mining, which are opening up a whole new world for us. Transportation, health and safety, and budget efficiency can all be vastly improved by applying sensor technology and real-time tracking devices to real life objects or events.image

Apps like GasBuddy, FitBit, and ParkSight 2.0 are already initiating changes to society. The Streetlines company made the Park Sight 2.0 app that can show driver where the nearest open parking spot is, saving them time and gasoline expenditures. In most cities parking is near the top of the list of highest revenues. Locating seats on a nearby bus, searching for safe biking routes, and knowing what charities are in need of the items you were about to toss out could be huge factors in changing the way our cities operate. Portland is a good example of a city which is benefiting from adopting the use of bike-friendly apps. There are vast benefits in providing our citizens with knowledge of changes we could make to help our city be a smart one. How many fewer people might be injured while biking? If you knew you could save money on gas by finding a ride share service or a safe biking route by using an app on your iPhone would you ditch your gas-guzzling F-150 for a 10 speed and a helmet?

Transportation is a large part of our economic structure and with improvements we can make everyone’s lives easier, safer and more efficient.

(newcitiesfoundation.org) (mashable.com)(Photo credit: University of Michigan Health System)

 

 

 

Proposed Medical School for Spokane

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As I am composing this article right now there are 210,000 residents living in Spokane, Washington. About 20% of those people are healthcare workers. Within the next five years, another 20% of those healthcare workers plan to retire from the workforce altogether. The baby-boomers of Spokane make up 33% of our population to this day and are growing closer to needing more care with each year. This trend has sparked the largest need for healthcare workers in history for us. Luckily for Spokane there is a plan of action in place.

The WSU board of regents has approved the pursuit of building a fully accredited medical school right here in Spokane. Consultation from MGT America showed that we already have most of the resources needed to provide an excellent learning experience for the medical students of the future. At $47 million per year to build and run the new school, many think we will be coming out ahead in the long run. With a doctor to citizen ratio of 1 to 1,000 we don’t really have a choice but to prepare for an even greater shortage in the future if nothing is done today. Only 15% of Washington’s medical students are enrolling in state and it has nothing to do with that being their preference. With only 135 spots open to future medical students and 3,200 applicants, things can get tricky. At UW there are approximately 100 spots open each year (for the past 40 years) for those who come from Eastern Washington. That number has yet to increase, despite the increase in our population.

With four large hospitals and even more specialty clinics around town, there appears to be plenty of space for third and fourth year medical students to get on the job training opportunities in many different areas of practice. Studies show we need to be training four times the number of students that we are right now to compensate for the shortages.The Medical School will provide a great solution to some of these problems. The Health Sciences building in Spokane is complimented by a world-class research institution and a unique sleep performance research center. A briefing of this new project and other features of the current campus are listed on the WSU website shown below.

(spokane.wsu.edu)(ofm.wa.gov)

Considering a Cloud-Computing Platform

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In your eyes, what might be the most important part of making your business excel? Using customer input and activity online to design individualized plans for future gains may be the new way to go.

Before data became “Big Data”, companies in banking, medicine, marketing, and service industries alike relied on customer feedback via website commentary or reviews received from customer service employees within the company for knowledge of any issues pertaining to products being offered. Now you may want to consider a better way to ensure customer satisfaction.

Tracking and monitoring customer activity and the use of predictive analytic applications to view your site’s visitors and activeties might help you ensure knowledge of future purchase choices and utilize helpful insight into marketing strategies for the future. While other companies speed ahead using customer data to improve overall business knowledge, you may be considering which tools for predictive analytics you could be benefiting from. Knowing what Cloud-Computing company to choose may be the hardest part of joining the Cloud revolution. Cloud storage is a main-stream business asset for the safety and access of your most important data now. Ensuring that the Cloud-Computing platform that you are evaluating is built by those who have years of experience is a good start. You may want to pick professionals with expertise in building Cloud platforms and providing visualization and analytical direction for your company data. Regarding your company, you might begin by investigating into Pushgraph and the other Cloud-Computing services that we offer at ChalkLabs.

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Who’s Already Benefiting from The Cloud?

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In order to evolve as a country we learn how to make the way we do business more and more efficient everyday. Cloud computing is becoming increasingly important in most areas of business due to the advantage of having important information in a safe place that is also easily accessible to others in your company.

The retail industry is at the top of our list of those who are already using the Cloud. Most of us have experienced by now the speed at which offers are customized and sent to our e-mail in-boxes due to a previous purchase from a website. Products and offers are now being based off of our past purchases and used to provide better insight into our future needs. Efforts to predict the needs of consumers have seemed to increased  thanks to the use of predictive analytics within the Cloud. Retailers are clearly taking advantage of Cloud benefits which show through improved channel operations, marketing, merchandising, and attention to customer service. And why not? Results from the retail industry demonstrate how Cloud-Computing can catapult your company into the future of our technology savvy atmosphere.

Business men and women of the Legal Industry are also pleased to have a better technique for data storage in a safe and secure environment that’s accessible company-wide. In fact nearly 75% of various attorneys claim they will be making use of  a Cloud this year. Reduction of I.T. personnel costs are an added bonus to making the switch from traditional data storage to a Cloud.

Bankers are also one of the first to jump on the band wagon for better productivity and responsiveness to improve customer service. New programs for employee use are being launched country-wide for easy enhancement of current software being used. Designed around the needs of each customer are ways to track effective marketing strategies to better understand what your customers needs are or what they may be in the future according to past data input. A standard level of security and structure within your Cloud Platform can lead to heightened overall competency among bankers as well. Enhancement of business as a whole could be the result of the shift into utilizing Cloud technologies for an array of industries.

Security seems to be the only concern left among the general public but this is only a valid concern if you don’t know the proper standards in security to look for when choosing a company to host your Cloud and provide your company services. Companies such as AWS (Amazon Web Services) are being named the new leaders in Public Cloud Computing because they provide good security and advanced protection for your most relevant company data and information. When you know who has the ability to provide what your company needs to be at it’s best, it may not be such a tough transition into the world of the Cloud for you any longer. (techpageone.dell.com 2014) (hostreview.com 2014) (mashable 2014)image