In the search for tools that sift vast amounts of data, a multitude of U.S. agencies have turned to TAC, a Boeing software product that can swiftly and automatically apply thousands of sophisticated queries to documents, data streams, and structured and unstructured data sets.
First deployed in 2005 and updated every six months, TAC “functions completely differently from anything else out there,” said Charles Fleischman, chief technical officer of Boeing’s Intelligence Systems Group. “You don’t ask it a question like on Google.”
Instead, Fleischman said, analysts “design a matrix of questions” that drive searches for ASCII characters — essentially, letters and numbers embedded in data. He said such searches do not require data to be preprocessed — for example, tagged to mark location, time or keywords — or placed within ontologies, which are lists of entities or terms that can be grouped and related within a hierarchy. TAC also does not rely on entity extraction, a process that automatically flags people, places and organizations of interest from unstructured text documents, he said.
The process is sophisticated enough that TAC automatically “searches for all the various spellings of al-Qaida as well as any other known or suspected information such as phone numbers, addresses or other identifying data,” Fleischman said.
“One of the current systems is asking over 600,000 shared questions across hundreds of millions of documents every day, creating over seven billion answers that are delivered automatically to the users. Each user is able to select as many questions as they want to monitor on a real-time basis,” Fleischman said.
The questions can be very broad — anything about a certain country — or very detailed, such as events occurring at a specific time or location.
“I could write a very strategic question with broad terms to make sure I don’t miss anything and then write additional queries that keep filtering the data down to a manageable level,” he said. For example, question one: bombings; question two: bombings in Afghanistan; question three: bombings in Kabul; question four: bombings in the Green Zone.
“Each question is getting more specific, but I only have to write the bombing part of the question once and then can reuse it for each specific location,” he said.
The software includes forms and templates that make it relatively easy for analysts to write the encoded questions that are used in the search.
“We can teach an analyst to be fairly fluent in half a day,” Fleischman said.
As TAC searches through data to find intelligence that answers the questions that analysts have asked, it uses “powerful pattern matching language” to compensate for misspellings and alternate spellings, Fleischman said.
It also uses “item proximity” to determine the relevance of words or numbers in relation to one another in a document or data set. Wild cards can be set to search for unknown data, and Boolean logic, a math-based analysis, is used to find relationships between the questions asked and answers hidden in the data.
Although the system does not recognize images, it does read metadata tagged to images, such as longitude and latitude indicators and time stamps, Fleischman said. It can also read captions, including captions attached to video.
When search results appear onscreen, TAC highlights important words and numbers in documents in red so they are easily spotted by analysts. It highlights terms in blue that are linked to questions that other analysts have asked about the same data.
And the software permits analysts to attach information tags and annotations to the highlighted items to further explain their relevance.
The system “was built for collaboration,” Fleischman said. “Your questions can be shared by everybody on the system — within classification and need-to-know constraints.”
The advantage of such teamwork is that one analyst will ask questions that another didn’t think to ask, sometimes revealing relationships between seemingly unrelated data.
TAC includes tools that will compare current documents with archived intelligence and sort documents according to the dates on which they appear. Items of interest — names, locations, incidents — are displayed in small boxes on a computer screen.
Clicking on a particular item retrieves intelligence related to the item while graphs in the box depict the frequency with which the item has appeared in recent data.
The arrangement enables analysts to quickly compare current and historic intelligence.
Since real-time analysis of data is a key TAC capability, the software is designed to alert analysts immediately when fresh intelligence is detected.
Fleischman helped develop the first version of TAC for the U.S. government in 2005. (The name stands for “tripwire analytic capability,” although “tripwire” is not used because it conflicts with another trademarked product.) At the time, he was chief technology officer of Kestrel Enterprises, a small company in Annapolis Junction, Md. By 2008, Kestrel’s software looked promising enough that Boeing bought the company along with several small technology firms as part of a move into business areas that are expected to grow even as other military spending shrinks.
In 2011, Boeing opened a 32,000-square-foot Cyber Engagement Center in Annapolis Junction right across the highway from the National Security Agency. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony, Boeing officials said the center will “work collaboratively with our customers to help defend their critical infrastructure,” as well as to protect Boeing’s own vast cyber network.
“We provide software as a service,” Fleishman said. That means TAC software manages systems on the customers’ servers, he said.
Boeing also provides software development, upgrades and maintenance, and offers a help desk, user support and training. Some of those are considered “engineering services above and beyond TAC,” and come at an extra cost, he said.
In July, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency announced plans to award Boeing a no-bid contract for TAC support, which the agency said they needed to combat weapons of mass destruction. DTRA also said it is hiring Boeing to “provide interfaces to existing data and analytic services and possibly combine services/data feeds in order to create unique data fusion opportunities.”
The DTRA deal came a month after the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center announced it is interested in obtaining tripwire analytic capability training and on-site system support for up to 400 intelligence analysts in Charlottesville, Va.
Other TAC clients include the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Air Force Intelligence Analysis Agency and the Joint Staff’s director of intelligence, who uses TAC for real time searching of data on the Defense Department’s classified network, SIPRNET.
The Joint IED Defeat Organization — JIEDDO — may have been the biggest fan, having spent at least $24.2 million customizing TAC for use as “a web-based analytic system that enhances counter-IED decision making through quantitative analytics,” according to agency documents.
At JIEDDO, TAC searches data as it streams into the agency’s computer network. The software also compares new-found intelligence to archived data to hunt for connections. Something as obscure as the part number stamped on a piece of an improvised bomb, for example, might tie multiple bombs together, or link the bombs to parts manufacturers. Bomb locations and other common characteristics might begin to shed light on the individuals or groups who make and plant the bombs.
It turns out that JIEDDO is a big fan of lots of analytic software. The Government Accountability Office reported in February that “JIEDDO has funded the development and support of approximately 70 electronic data collection and analysis tools.” Not surprisingly, there was “overlap to some degree,” the GAO said.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Sunday, October 7, 2012
"Anything On The Web Will Be Discovered"
“Not a day goes by that I don’t hear about a virus or a breach. For me, there is a very clear equation since I began my service in the NSA: If you put something on the Web, it will be discovered. There will always be threats. Every software has holes. I can’t speak about specific events, but the threats exist and they are real,” says Nick Combs, Chief Technological Officer of the federal department at EMC, in an interview held during his visit to Israel in June.
Combs made his way to the commercial field after nearly 30 years in which he presided in a variety of senior positions in the US intelligence community, in organizations such as the NSA, DoDIIS and others. Today he is responsible for EMC’s interface with the intelligence community, the postal service and all branches of government, in intelligence and the Department of Defense in the United States. In the framework of his job, he learned of technological developments and challenges in both the commercial world and the defense field, and like other senior officials in the IT field around the world, he believes that cyber exists and represents a genuine threat.
“The cyber war is a genuine threat. The critical infrastructures are based on technology and electricity, and it’s enough to think of a scenario in which a nuclear facility loses control to emphasize the threat. In the field of crucial infrastructure defense, it would be a disaster if the systems are revealed. This is why there is a need to transition from static architecture to proactive control. This is not just to allow for entry, but also to protect the information itself. The next war will be fought in the cyber expanse, that much is sure.
“A senator approached me once and asked, ‘tell me, Nick, with all these cyber threats, why does nothing work?’. I replied that the hackers don’t want the systems to work. They want to be there, see what we are planning to do and be prepared. The working assumption is that hackers are inside all of our systems.
“Today, security is no more than a broken defense network, with security solution points in the form of products. We need to build the defensive measures directly into the hardware. We must build an architecture that begins in the software, through the operating system and up to the hardware. This is another way to look at information security.
“A border security (entry) needs to be passed to manage the information. The commercial industry does this well. For example, if I travel to the US and I've stopped to fill up on fuel at a place that is beyond my ordinary behavior pattern, I need to provide my zip code in addition to my credit card. In another instance, if I made a payment in Los Angeles and was at the east coast two hours later, the system automatically halts my payments. This is identification over several stages.
“To take another scenario, in the military, if I enter my office every day, then perhaps I don’t need security to be so strong on my stationary computer. However, if I take my portable computer, then several stages of identification are needed. We must put information security around the information itself, and limit the access to it in a manner that will allow every element to be exposed solely to the information it requires. This is all about information management rights.”
“It all depends on how you define a cloud. There are public, private and hybrid clouds. There are dozens of governmental organizations and six large intelligence agencies in the United States, and they are all collected to a cloud. This can be done with a public cloud, and these capabilities can also be brought to the intelligence community via a hybrid cloud. This is a collection of clouds connected together with a shared infrastructure.
“In today’s intelligence, we need to be able to exchange information between the different organizations. There are challenges in connecting between groups such as the DEA, NSA and others, but it is possible to establish such a community cloud for intelligence. People need to understand that you can still supply a cloud and supply the necessary sensitivities pertaining to the information. If we can do this in the US, it can also be done in other places.”
“It is a considerable challenge. If you see the US army and think of a perception that says ‘every soldier is a sensor', in the sense that the soldier is a source of information and there are 1.5 million soldiers – then we are talking about 1.5 million sensors. There are capabilities such as 3G and 4G networks that the military is thinking of incorporating in the battlefield. One of the most difficult things to do is to incorporate such communication capabilities in the last mile. How do I incorporate these capabilities, and how do I enable national tactical systems to communicate with the soldiers in the field? This is not a simple challenge.
“Another challenge is to develop analysis and fusion capabilities for big data. Today, we can collect the information and analyze, but one of the challenges is to carry out a decentralized analysis via an ‘information marker’, which is an entity present in various places in the field, carrying out local analysis and working with the central system.
Combs made his way to the commercial field after nearly 30 years in which he presided in a variety of senior positions in the US intelligence community, in organizations such as the NSA, DoDIIS and others. Today he is responsible for EMC’s interface with the intelligence community, the postal service and all branches of government, in intelligence and the Department of Defense in the United States. In the framework of his job, he learned of technological developments and challenges in both the commercial world and the defense field, and like other senior officials in the IT field around the world, he believes that cyber exists and represents a genuine threat.
“The cyber war is a genuine threat. The critical infrastructures are based on technology and electricity, and it’s enough to think of a scenario in which a nuclear facility loses control to emphasize the threat. In the field of crucial infrastructure defense, it would be a disaster if the systems are revealed. This is why there is a need to transition from static architecture to proactive control. This is not just to allow for entry, but also to protect the information itself. The next war will be fought in the cyber expanse, that much is sure.
“A senator approached me once and asked, ‘tell me, Nick, with all these cyber threats, why does nothing work?’. I replied that the hackers don’t want the systems to work. They want to be there, see what we are planning to do and be prepared. The working assumption is that hackers are inside all of our systems.
“Today, security is no more than a broken defense network, with security solution points in the form of products. We need to build the defensive measures directly into the hardware. We must build an architecture that begins in the software, through the operating system and up to the hardware. This is another way to look at information security.
“A border security (entry) needs to be passed to manage the information. The commercial industry does this well. For example, if I travel to the US and I've stopped to fill up on fuel at a place that is beyond my ordinary behavior pattern, I need to provide my zip code in addition to my credit card. In another instance, if I made a payment in Los Angeles and was at the east coast two hours later, the system automatically halts my payments. This is identification over several stages.
“To take another scenario, in the military, if I enter my office every day, then perhaps I don’t need security to be so strong on my stationary computer. However, if I take my portable computer, then several stages of identification are needed. We must put information security around the information itself, and limit the access to it in a manner that will allow every element to be exposed solely to the information it requires. This is all about information management rights.”
“It all depends on how you define a cloud. There are public, private and hybrid clouds. There are dozens of governmental organizations and six large intelligence agencies in the United States, and they are all collected to a cloud. This can be done with a public cloud, and these capabilities can also be brought to the intelligence community via a hybrid cloud. This is a collection of clouds connected together with a shared infrastructure.
“In today’s intelligence, we need to be able to exchange information between the different organizations. There are challenges in connecting between groups such as the DEA, NSA and others, but it is possible to establish such a community cloud for intelligence. People need to understand that you can still supply a cloud and supply the necessary sensitivities pertaining to the information. If we can do this in the US, it can also be done in other places.”
“It is a considerable challenge. If you see the US army and think of a perception that says ‘every soldier is a sensor', in the sense that the soldier is a source of information and there are 1.5 million soldiers – then we are talking about 1.5 million sensors. There are capabilities such as 3G and 4G networks that the military is thinking of incorporating in the battlefield. One of the most difficult things to do is to incorporate such communication capabilities in the last mile. How do I incorporate these capabilities, and how do I enable national tactical systems to communicate with the soldiers in the field? This is not a simple challenge.
“Another challenge is to develop analysis and fusion capabilities for big data. Today, we can collect the information and analyze, but one of the challenges is to carry out a decentralized analysis via an ‘information marker’, which is an entity present in various places in the field, carrying out local analysis and working with the central system.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Reading the Beautiful Mysteries of Louise Penny
Great novels, each one, and now I am left with the agony of waiting for the next installment. A whole year? I cannot wait that long! Write quickly, dear Ms. Penny, write quickly!
Penny's novels are rich and full, intelligent and entertaining, and worthy of all the many awards they've garnered (including the Agatha Award for Best Novel, and the Dilys, Arthur Ellis, Anthony, Macavity, and Nero Awards).
Set in the province of Quebec, Penny uses the history of old Canada to set up her characters, and illustrate their differing personalities and backgrounds. She then takes on huge themes -- memory, guilt, hope, love, friendship -- that are amplified but never overtaken by the murder mystery the quietly heroic and hugely kind Inspector Gamache must solve, time after time -- and time and again in the tiny but absolutely enchanting village of Three Pines, with its lively citizenry of artists, a poet (rude beyond belief but with a core of gold), a gay couple, a retired psychologist running a bookstore, and a slew of minor originals, including a young man nicknamed "Old" and his wife, nicknamed "the Wife."
Not all the stories take place in Three Pines (there is only so much murder a small village can tolerate -- or produce) and although at first I missed the small town atmosphere and charm (blooming bushes! crackling hearths! bottles of wine and loaves of bread and boards of cheese and long walks along the rustic river), Penny makes sure her characters eat well no matter where they are, and her writing guarantees that atmosphere never takes a back seat.
In her latest, The Beautiful Mystery, Gamache finds himself behind centuries-old stonewalls, soaking up the beauty of Gregorian chants and the ugliness of murder (along with the delights of rich stews, breads, cheeses, and wild blueberries dipped in dark chocolate). In Bury Your Dead, he is in Quebec City for Winter Carnival; but except for a few mentions of revelers and Caribou (a fatal drink made from vodka, brandy, sherry and port), the focus is on an old library of the tiny English community, and its connection to the hero of Quebec and French separatists, Samuel Champlain. Penny never skimps on her research of food, history, location, or psychology and the result is books that are absolutely addicting.
But not only are we drawn into Penny's novels by the places and the food and the murder itself (always a bit strange and fascinating) but because Penny writes books about people whom we come to know as friends -- compelling friends, who deserve our interest and ignite our caring.
With that caring comes pain. Not all of Penny's characters come through the darkness imposed by murder and make it through to the light on the other side. Penny doesn't write feel-good, frothy novels with everything falling neatly into place by the finish, but instead she creates real scenarios that expose the tolls exacted by real living, where good is not always rewarded and evil not always punished. Penny shows us that lives can be overtaken by the tolls of abuse, deceit, greed, and revenge -- and lives lost.
I finish reading the novels of Louise Penny with feelings of great satisfaction, renewed awe, and just a bit of anxiety: She leaves a question (or two, or three) unanswered but persistent, and we poor readers must wait! We must wait for the next novel to find out how and where, when and if, justice will be delivered, love affirmed, and happiness awarded to those that have waited too long for it. Waiting, waiting -- must I really wait a whole year to find out what happens next to Gamache, his sidekick Beauvoir, and the friends that surround them, the enemies that invade them?
Yes, I must wait. But in the meantime, I can reread the seven novels that came before. Because there are new clues to be found, I am sure; there are people to meet again, and see in a new light; and there are places to return to (food and hearth, wine and conversation!). And always, always there is murder. Awful murders, wonderful novels.
Penny's novels are rich and full, intelligent and entertaining, and worthy of all the many awards they've garnered (including the Agatha Award for Best Novel, and the Dilys, Arthur Ellis, Anthony, Macavity, and Nero Awards).
Set in the province of Quebec, Penny uses the history of old Canada to set up her characters, and illustrate their differing personalities and backgrounds. She then takes on huge themes -- memory, guilt, hope, love, friendship -- that are amplified but never overtaken by the murder mystery the quietly heroic and hugely kind Inspector Gamache must solve, time after time -- and time and again in the tiny but absolutely enchanting village of Three Pines, with its lively citizenry of artists, a poet (rude beyond belief but with a core of gold), a gay couple, a retired psychologist running a bookstore, and a slew of minor originals, including a young man nicknamed "Old" and his wife, nicknamed "the Wife."
Not all the stories take place in Three Pines (there is only so much murder a small village can tolerate -- or produce) and although at first I missed the small town atmosphere and charm (blooming bushes! crackling hearths! bottles of wine and loaves of bread and boards of cheese and long walks along the rustic river), Penny makes sure her characters eat well no matter where they are, and her writing guarantees that atmosphere never takes a back seat.
In her latest, The Beautiful Mystery, Gamache finds himself behind centuries-old stonewalls, soaking up the beauty of Gregorian chants and the ugliness of murder (along with the delights of rich stews, breads, cheeses, and wild blueberries dipped in dark chocolate). In Bury Your Dead, he is in Quebec City for Winter Carnival; but except for a few mentions of revelers and Caribou (a fatal drink made from vodka, brandy, sherry and port), the focus is on an old library of the tiny English community, and its connection to the hero of Quebec and French separatists, Samuel Champlain. Penny never skimps on her research of food, history, location, or psychology and the result is books that are absolutely addicting.
But not only are we drawn into Penny's novels by the places and the food and the murder itself (always a bit strange and fascinating) but because Penny writes books about people whom we come to know as friends -- compelling friends, who deserve our interest and ignite our caring.
With that caring comes pain. Not all of Penny's characters come through the darkness imposed by murder and make it through to the light on the other side. Penny doesn't write feel-good, frothy novels with everything falling neatly into place by the finish, but instead she creates real scenarios that expose the tolls exacted by real living, where good is not always rewarded and evil not always punished. Penny shows us that lives can be overtaken by the tolls of abuse, deceit, greed, and revenge -- and lives lost.
I finish reading the novels of Louise Penny with feelings of great satisfaction, renewed awe, and just a bit of anxiety: She leaves a question (or two, or three) unanswered but persistent, and we poor readers must wait! We must wait for the next novel to find out how and where, when and if, justice will be delivered, love affirmed, and happiness awarded to those that have waited too long for it. Waiting, waiting -- must I really wait a whole year to find out what happens next to Gamache, his sidekick Beauvoir, and the friends that surround them, the enemies that invade them?
Yes, I must wait. But in the meantime, I can reread the seven novels that came before. Because there are new clues to be found, I am sure; there are people to meet again, and see in a new light; and there are places to return to (food and hearth, wine and conversation!). And always, always there is murder. Awful murders, wonderful novels.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Give website a periodic checkup
When was the last time you gauged the overall health of your business website? If it's been a while, you're not alone.
Best practices in website design, development and optimization are constantly changing, and it can be hard to keep up. With all the hats that business owners wear, it is not always possible to keep current on the latest trends and fads.
The good news is you don't have to be on the cutting edge. Just like diet and exercise, there are certain things that never go out of style, and robust websites that drive business still come down to a set of core fundamentals. Consider these five questions as a starting point for making sure your website is in good working order and serving the interests of your enterprise.
1. Is your site designed according to visitor profiles? Depending on your specific business, your website may need to speak effectively to multiple audiences or types of visitors. Examples include existing customers, prospective customers, suppliers, distributors and employees. Consider organizing your online content by visitor profile to streamline navigation and reduce the number of clicks it takes for someone to get to the information they are seeking.
Some companies take this approach a step further by building distinct portals, sometimes with password protection, for internal versus external users, retail versus wholesale users, or patients versus health professionals, just to give a few examples.
2. Is your site optimized for your keywords? Even though basic knowledge about search-engine optimization is becoming more common, I still see a lot of business websites that are "optimized" for the company name. The problem with this is that by the time someone types "Arcadia Lawn Care" into Google, they are already aware of your company and actively trying to reach you, so that search probably does not add visibility to your brand. Instead, think of likely words someone might use while searching for your type of company, such as "lawn mowing services Springfield."
If you do nothing else, be sure that the title tag of your homepage combines your company name with your most likely keywords, e.g. "Arcadia Lawn Care landscaping and mowing services, Springfield IL," preferably in 70 characters or less. You can check your homepage title tag either by hovering your mouse over the tab at the top of your browser or by right-clicking on the page, selecting "view page source," and searching for the word "title."
3. Is your site searchable by engines? Once you've organized your site for your visitors and optimized your pages for keywords, you'll want to make sure that search engines are seeing your website correctly. One way to do this is to use Google Webmaster Tools. Once you have it set up, you can use their "Health" features such as "crawl errors," "fetch as Google," and "index status" to make sure all of your intended content is visible to the engine.
4. Is your site searchable by humans? Any site with more than five pages of content could potentially benefit from adding a site search feature. Many users simply prefer to type "hours" into a search box on your homepage, rather than click around to see if that information is listed under "About" or "Locations."
Recent entrants into this space include Swiftype, a free service which enables nonprogrammers to add a search function to their websites, complete with auto-complete, customized search results and real-time analytics. This kind of functionality allows you to see what questions your visitors are asking and then immediately make those answers easier to find.
5. Is your site loading quickly and consistently? Consider using a downtime and response time monitoring service. The more critical your website is to your business, the more you need to know immediately if your site goes down or slows to unacceptable levels. You might think the worst-case scenario is getting a call from an unhappy customer about your website being down, but actually, the worst-case scenario is that you never get that call because that customer simply clicked on the next website and called your competitor instead.
Services such as Pingdom can provide an early warning system, giving you a head start on fixing any availability problems. If you sign up for a free account, you'll be able to monitor one website and receive 20 text message alerts when your website does not respond. You'll also be able to see response time reports, which can warn you about slow loading speeds for your users. Generally, you want to make sure your website pages load in less than 2 seconds.
Taken together, these five questions provide the vital signs for your business website, equivalent to temperature, pulse, and blood pressure. Make sure you put first things first by addressing these fundamentals for a healthy online presence.
Best practices in website design, development and optimization are constantly changing, and it can be hard to keep up. With all the hats that business owners wear, it is not always possible to keep current on the latest trends and fads.
The good news is you don't have to be on the cutting edge. Just like diet and exercise, there are certain things that never go out of style, and robust websites that drive business still come down to a set of core fundamentals. Consider these five questions as a starting point for making sure your website is in good working order and serving the interests of your enterprise.
1. Is your site designed according to visitor profiles? Depending on your specific business, your website may need to speak effectively to multiple audiences or types of visitors. Examples include existing customers, prospective customers, suppliers, distributors and employees. Consider organizing your online content by visitor profile to streamline navigation and reduce the number of clicks it takes for someone to get to the information they are seeking.
Some companies take this approach a step further by building distinct portals, sometimes with password protection, for internal versus external users, retail versus wholesale users, or patients versus health professionals, just to give a few examples.
2. Is your site optimized for your keywords? Even though basic knowledge about search-engine optimization is becoming more common, I still see a lot of business websites that are "optimized" for the company name. The problem with this is that by the time someone types "Arcadia Lawn Care" into Google, they are already aware of your company and actively trying to reach you, so that search probably does not add visibility to your brand. Instead, think of likely words someone might use while searching for your type of company, such as "lawn mowing services Springfield."
If you do nothing else, be sure that the title tag of your homepage combines your company name with your most likely keywords, e.g. "Arcadia Lawn Care landscaping and mowing services, Springfield IL," preferably in 70 characters or less. You can check your homepage title tag either by hovering your mouse over the tab at the top of your browser or by right-clicking on the page, selecting "view page source," and searching for the word "title."
3. Is your site searchable by engines? Once you've organized your site for your visitors and optimized your pages for keywords, you'll want to make sure that search engines are seeing your website correctly. One way to do this is to use Google Webmaster Tools. Once you have it set up, you can use their "Health" features such as "crawl errors," "fetch as Google," and "index status" to make sure all of your intended content is visible to the engine.
4. Is your site searchable by humans? Any site with more than five pages of content could potentially benefit from adding a site search feature. Many users simply prefer to type "hours" into a search box on your homepage, rather than click around to see if that information is listed under "About" or "Locations."
Recent entrants into this space include Swiftype, a free service which enables nonprogrammers to add a search function to their websites, complete with auto-complete, customized search results and real-time analytics. This kind of functionality allows you to see what questions your visitors are asking and then immediately make those answers easier to find.
5. Is your site loading quickly and consistently? Consider using a downtime and response time monitoring service. The more critical your website is to your business, the more you need to know immediately if your site goes down or slows to unacceptable levels. You might think the worst-case scenario is getting a call from an unhappy customer about your website being down, but actually, the worst-case scenario is that you never get that call because that customer simply clicked on the next website and called your competitor instead.
Services such as Pingdom can provide an early warning system, giving you a head start on fixing any availability problems. If you sign up for a free account, you'll be able to monitor one website and receive 20 text message alerts when your website does not respond. You'll also be able to see response time reports, which can warn you about slow loading speeds for your users. Generally, you want to make sure your website pages load in less than 2 seconds.
Taken together, these five questions provide the vital signs for your business website, equivalent to temperature, pulse, and blood pressure. Make sure you put first things first by addressing these fundamentals for a healthy online presence.
Monday, September 24, 2012
My Technology Is Smart
My friend called me last week and said that she was at an editor's lunch in New York City. When her colleague left the table for the restroom, my friend immediately reached for her smartphone to check texts, email, and her Twitter feed. Then she stopped herself. She put her phone down, lifted her head, and looked around. And she saw something interesting: All of the single people in the restaurant (those sitting alone) were either on their phones, Blackberrys, iPads, or laptops. No one was looking around. Not a single person.
It dawned on my friend this is the new normal. No one looks around anymore. No one looks up from their screens. And although they live in a big city -- THE Big Apple, in fact -- the people around her live in the small world of their own screens. They meet no one new. They don't ask for directions on the street and they don't talk to people near them in the coffee shop. They're busy with their time-consuming technologies.
My wife and I were talking about this the other day and we realized that no one knows anyone's phone number any more. There are thousands of digits in any given iPhone, but not a single seven-digit number in anyone's head. My mother-in-law doesn't know her own daughters' numbers. I don't know my own sister's. Basically, why memorize something that a cell phone already knows?
And although I send hundreds of emails each month, I don't know anyone's real or electronic addresses. I have no idea how to send a letter to any of my five siblings because, address-wise, I don't know where they live. I literally don't.
And speaking of location, Nokia did a study four years ago that showed that a quarter of the world's population can't get around their own home towns or cities without GPS units, and the percentage of map-crippled individuals has to be growing. Many people literally don't know where they are or how to get anywhere around them. The art and relationship of map, navigation, and spatial memory is quickly being lost.
If using our brains in complicated ways, if memorization and challenging recall help to stave off Alzheimer's and the effects of Parkinson's, why are we allowing for these trade-for-brain technologies in every area of life? Why can college students not use a real dictionary or thesaurus? Why would I use a phone to do simple multiplication? And should we eventually have everything taught to us via 140-character life-lesson-text-messages?
What I'm really asking is: How did we get here? Why is our society the way it is now?
Well, because things are easy -- easy on the brain, easy on the memory, easy on effort. Why try when you don't have to try? Why work at anything? Wait, why work at all?
There's an app that allows two iPhones to "bump" and trade digits so the owners don't even have to type in any numbers. Sounds good. Maybe, pretty soon, no one will even have to take beginning math. Maybe they won't have to even know numbers anymore. What comes after the number 17? Who cares?
And with instant messaging there's no need to know how to spell or use the conventions of grammar. It's easier to email. It's easier to text. It's easier to use the GPS on the dashboard.
It dawned on my friend this is the new normal. No one looks around anymore. No one looks up from their screens. And although they live in a big city -- THE Big Apple, in fact -- the people around her live in the small world of their own screens. They meet no one new. They don't ask for directions on the street and they don't talk to people near them in the coffee shop. They're busy with their time-consuming technologies.
My wife and I were talking about this the other day and we realized that no one knows anyone's phone number any more. There are thousands of digits in any given iPhone, but not a single seven-digit number in anyone's head. My mother-in-law doesn't know her own daughters' numbers. I don't know my own sister's. Basically, why memorize something that a cell phone already knows?
And although I send hundreds of emails each month, I don't know anyone's real or electronic addresses. I have no idea how to send a letter to any of my five siblings because, address-wise, I don't know where they live. I literally don't.
And speaking of location, Nokia did a study four years ago that showed that a quarter of the world's population can't get around their own home towns or cities without GPS units, and the percentage of map-crippled individuals has to be growing. Many people literally don't know where they are or how to get anywhere around them. The art and relationship of map, navigation, and spatial memory is quickly being lost.
If using our brains in complicated ways, if memorization and challenging recall help to stave off Alzheimer's and the effects of Parkinson's, why are we allowing for these trade-for-brain technologies in every area of life? Why can college students not use a real dictionary or thesaurus? Why would I use a phone to do simple multiplication? And should we eventually have everything taught to us via 140-character life-lesson-text-messages?
What I'm really asking is: How did we get here? Why is our society the way it is now?
Well, because things are easy -- easy on the brain, easy on the memory, easy on effort. Why try when you don't have to try? Why work at anything? Wait, why work at all?
There's an app that allows two iPhones to "bump" and trade digits so the owners don't even have to type in any numbers. Sounds good. Maybe, pretty soon, no one will even have to take beginning math. Maybe they won't have to even know numbers anymore. What comes after the number 17? Who cares?
And with instant messaging there's no need to know how to spell or use the conventions of grammar. It's easier to email. It's easier to text. It's easier to use the GPS on the dashboard.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
How industries are embracing efficiency
Deprive your body of water and you'll be dead within a week. The survival rate is similar for some of the largest industries equally dependent on water to grow food and make goods such as jeans, beverages, electric power, homes, chemicals and even computer chips.
While many people depend on these products, at the same time, many local communities are competing with manufacturers for limited water resources. For example, the computer chip maker Intel estimates it takes 16 gallons of water to produce a single chip, which explains its huge appetite for water in 2011: some 8.3bn gallons from local water systems. Comparatively, the average American uses about 100 gallons of water each day; the average African just five gallons.
Competition for water is only expected to increase, as highlighted recently at the World Water Week conference. For companies in these water intensive industries, addressing these competing demands and implementing an effective water management strategy has become essential.
At Intel, an increased focus on environmental issues came in the 1990s, as the computer industry grew rapidly. Since then, while their consumption of water has increased each year, so have their efforts to reduce the impact to local communities, according to Todd Brady, the company's global environmental manager.
For these efforts, in 2007, the US Environmental Protection Agency recognised the company as a water efficiency leader. And by 2011, some 80% of the water it used was recycled and sent back to local water systems, where it was used for irrigation, in other industrial purposes, or for drinking water. This journey, according to Brady, was a process of engaging employees, local communities and industry partners.
"The semi-conductor manufacturing process goes through hundreds of steps," Brady explained, "and in between those steps we have to rinse off the surface of the wafer with ultra-pure water." When searching for ways to reduce and reuse the water used in this process, one of the first places Intel looks is inside, soliciting ideas from the engineers who are closest to the manufacturing process.
Intel encourages employees to come forward with ideas on conserving resources, and then matches the best ideas with a grant to develop them. "We thought we would eventually run out of ideas, but the programme is still going strong," says Brady. Most of these innovations, he adds, not only save on resources but also money, providing a payback in three years or less.
Among environmental impacts, water use is a particularly local challenge, more so than greenhouse gas emissions, the impact of which may be several states away, says Brady. To compound this challenge, Intel has located several of its largest fabrication plants in areas that are particularly water-constrained, such as Arizona and Israel.
Rather than offer a one-size-fits-all approach, Intel attempts to tailor its water management solutions for each municipality in which it operates. "We engage with the community and the water districts early on to understand their needs, discuss our needs and find solutions that work for both of us," he says.
At the Israel location, for example, working with the local government, Intel was able to change some of the chemicals used in its manufacturing so the water from this process could be treated and reused for irrigation on local farms.
The company has also learned to be as transparent as possible. "By opening your books to what you are doing, you build trust. Otherwise there is suspicion and mistrust," says Brady.
Earlier this year, Intel collaborated with engineering firm CH2M Hill and Arizona State University to help develop the website WaterMatch. The idea is to maximise the reuse of so-called "greywater". This is wastewater that can be treated and reused for industrial or agricultural purposes, but not for drinking water.
The website, which is free to use, will match entities that have excess wastewater, like water treatment plants, with those that can use it in lieu of taking fresh water from local supplies. CH2M Hill showcased the website at World Water Week.
Intel has made steady progress to conserve the amount of water used in its manufacturing. Still, the company failed to meet its most recent goal to cut the water required per chip below 2008 levels by year-end 2011. The challenge, says Brady, is the pace of technical innovation and the increasing complexity of the products each year. As you pack more transistors on the chip, you increase the number of steps that use water to rinse and clean the chip, he explains.
The takeaway here for Intel and others, he says: "You must be proactive, be strategic in your thinking. You can't just look at issues year-to-year. You must consider where your business and products are going over the next decade and how you can intercept that to achieve the goals you've set."
While many people depend on these products, at the same time, many local communities are competing with manufacturers for limited water resources. For example, the computer chip maker Intel estimates it takes 16 gallons of water to produce a single chip, which explains its huge appetite for water in 2011: some 8.3bn gallons from local water systems. Comparatively, the average American uses about 100 gallons of water each day; the average African just five gallons.
Competition for water is only expected to increase, as highlighted recently at the World Water Week conference. For companies in these water intensive industries, addressing these competing demands and implementing an effective water management strategy has become essential.
At Intel, an increased focus on environmental issues came in the 1990s, as the computer industry grew rapidly. Since then, while their consumption of water has increased each year, so have their efforts to reduce the impact to local communities, according to Todd Brady, the company's global environmental manager.
For these efforts, in 2007, the US Environmental Protection Agency recognised the company as a water efficiency leader. And by 2011, some 80% of the water it used was recycled and sent back to local water systems, where it was used for irrigation, in other industrial purposes, or for drinking water. This journey, according to Brady, was a process of engaging employees, local communities and industry partners.
"The semi-conductor manufacturing process goes through hundreds of steps," Brady explained, "and in between those steps we have to rinse off the surface of the wafer with ultra-pure water." When searching for ways to reduce and reuse the water used in this process, one of the first places Intel looks is inside, soliciting ideas from the engineers who are closest to the manufacturing process.
Intel encourages employees to come forward with ideas on conserving resources, and then matches the best ideas with a grant to develop them. "We thought we would eventually run out of ideas, but the programme is still going strong," says Brady. Most of these innovations, he adds, not only save on resources but also money, providing a payback in three years or less.
Among environmental impacts, water use is a particularly local challenge, more so than greenhouse gas emissions, the impact of which may be several states away, says Brady. To compound this challenge, Intel has located several of its largest fabrication plants in areas that are particularly water-constrained, such as Arizona and Israel.
Rather than offer a one-size-fits-all approach, Intel attempts to tailor its water management solutions for each municipality in which it operates. "We engage with the community and the water districts early on to understand their needs, discuss our needs and find solutions that work for both of us," he says.
At the Israel location, for example, working with the local government, Intel was able to change some of the chemicals used in its manufacturing so the water from this process could be treated and reused for irrigation on local farms.
The company has also learned to be as transparent as possible. "By opening your books to what you are doing, you build trust. Otherwise there is suspicion and mistrust," says Brady.
Earlier this year, Intel collaborated with engineering firm CH2M Hill and Arizona State University to help develop the website WaterMatch. The idea is to maximise the reuse of so-called "greywater". This is wastewater that can be treated and reused for industrial or agricultural purposes, but not for drinking water.
The website, which is free to use, will match entities that have excess wastewater, like water treatment plants, with those that can use it in lieu of taking fresh water from local supplies. CH2M Hill showcased the website at World Water Week.
Intel has made steady progress to conserve the amount of water used in its manufacturing. Still, the company failed to meet its most recent goal to cut the water required per chip below 2008 levels by year-end 2011. The challenge, says Brady, is the pace of technical innovation and the increasing complexity of the products each year. As you pack more transistors on the chip, you increase the number of steps that use water to rinse and clean the chip, he explains.
The takeaway here for Intel and others, he says: "You must be proactive, be strategic in your thinking. You can't just look at issues year-to-year. You must consider where your business and products are going over the next decade and how you can intercept that to achieve the goals you've set."
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Pinot’s Palette continues expansion
Pinot’s Palette, a national Paint and Sip franchise known for providing guests with an entertaining evening of art and wine, is experiencing unprecedented growth in 2012 with the signing of 15 franchise agreements and the opening of four studios including The Woodlands.
The company is on track to open an additional 10 studios by the end of the year.
Earlier this month, a studio opened in Sugar Land and studios in the Memorial City Mall area in Houston and a studio in The Woodlands are expected to open by early October, which will mark the brands sixth studio in the Greater Houston Area and the company’s tenth location overall. Eight more studios will open in Atlanta, Ga.; Tyler and San Antonio, Texas; Chicago, Ill.; Oklahoma City, Okla., Fort Collins,Louisville, Ky., and Lafayette, La., before the end of the year. Additionally, agreements were recently signed with five new franchisees to develop studios in Kansas City and St. Louis, Mo.; Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Okla., and Allen, Texas.
“This is an exciting time for Pinot’s Palette. Entertainment art is a rapidly growing industry and we have a vibrant, energizing brand that is poised for expansion in cities across the country,” said Craig Ceccanti, chief executive officer, Pinot’s Palette. “The combination of our superior customer service, innovative technology, simple operations and in-depth marketing strategies allow our franchisees to execute our ‘Paint. Drink. Have Fun.’ promise and deliver a social setting that appeals to the masses.”
At Pinot’s Palette, guests sign up online to attend a two or three hour painting class where they are instructed by a local, trained artist how to recreate the featured painting of the night. Pinot’s Palette supplies art supplies, plates and wine glasses and guests are encouraged to bring their own wine and snacks, although some studios offer adult beverages for purchase. Franchisees have access to extensive painting libraries of tested artwork as well as the ability to create their own paintings to respond to guests’ changing taste in artwork and local trends in their respective communities.
“We are looking for professionals with strong community ties and a passion for creating memorable experiences to help grow the company into new markets,” said Ceccanti. “Our proven systems and extensive corporate support differentiate us from our competitors and make us an ideal franchise opportunity for entrepreneurs looking to bring a strong Paint and Sip concept to their city.”
In addition to pre-opening, training, and ongoing support, franchisees are equipped with Pinot Technology Suite (PTS), an automated communication system designed to streamline administrative tasks. The proprietary PTS system has evolved to be the hub of studio management, integrating all aspects of the business from point of sale transactions, tracking reservations, artist scheduling, payroll and more. Easy to use business reporting tools and real time guest information is readily available at the franchisees and employees fingertips allowing the business to run more efficiently.
The company is on track to open an additional 10 studios by the end of the year.
Earlier this month, a studio opened in Sugar Land and studios in the Memorial City Mall area in Houston and a studio in The Woodlands are expected to open by early October, which will mark the brands sixth studio in the Greater Houston Area and the company’s tenth location overall. Eight more studios will open in Atlanta, Ga.; Tyler and San Antonio, Texas; Chicago, Ill.; Oklahoma City, Okla., Fort Collins,Louisville, Ky., and Lafayette, La., before the end of the year. Additionally, agreements were recently signed with five new franchisees to develop studios in Kansas City and St. Louis, Mo.; Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Okla., and Allen, Texas.
“This is an exciting time for Pinot’s Palette. Entertainment art is a rapidly growing industry and we have a vibrant, energizing brand that is poised for expansion in cities across the country,” said Craig Ceccanti, chief executive officer, Pinot’s Palette. “The combination of our superior customer service, innovative technology, simple operations and in-depth marketing strategies allow our franchisees to execute our ‘Paint. Drink. Have Fun.’ promise and deliver a social setting that appeals to the masses.”
At Pinot’s Palette, guests sign up online to attend a two or three hour painting class where they are instructed by a local, trained artist how to recreate the featured painting of the night. Pinot’s Palette supplies art supplies, plates and wine glasses and guests are encouraged to bring their own wine and snacks, although some studios offer adult beverages for purchase. Franchisees have access to extensive painting libraries of tested artwork as well as the ability to create their own paintings to respond to guests’ changing taste in artwork and local trends in their respective communities.
“We are looking for professionals with strong community ties and a passion for creating memorable experiences to help grow the company into new markets,” said Ceccanti. “Our proven systems and extensive corporate support differentiate us from our competitors and make us an ideal franchise opportunity for entrepreneurs looking to bring a strong Paint and Sip concept to their city.”
In addition to pre-opening, training, and ongoing support, franchisees are equipped with Pinot Technology Suite (PTS), an automated communication system designed to streamline administrative tasks. The proprietary PTS system has evolved to be the hub of studio management, integrating all aspects of the business from point of sale transactions, tracking reservations, artist scheduling, payroll and more. Easy to use business reporting tools and real time guest information is readily available at the franchisees and employees fingertips allowing the business to run more efficiently.
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