Gateway Bancorp's bank tellers, loan officers, and other employees rely on a series of financial software applications behind the scenes to better serve customers.
In order to achieve maximum uptime for these key applications, Gateway chose to virtualize its infrastructure.
The result? The bank reduced system downtime by 80%.
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Chalk another one up for the post-PC era: ADP recently launched RUN, a slick-looking mobile version of its popular payroll application. The app integrates with the desktop version of ADP's software and enables fiscal staff to: review and enter payroll, edit hours and pay rates, manage direct deposits, enter vacation and other time off, calculate taxes and more. Interestingly, ADP chose to release this for iOS before BlackBerry, but ADP is planning BlackBerry and Android versions by the end of the year. The free app may herald the future of enterprise computing dominated by mobile applications instead of desktop software.
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Matthew McKenzie at Enterprise Efficiency points to an IBM survey that found that the majority of the 2,000 enterprise IT professionals responding thought "within the next five years, more developers will be working on mobile applications and cloud-based architecture than traditional computing platforms for enterprise."
McKenzie notes, "It's not a group I would consider vulnerable to hype-mongering, especially when this is the sort of trend that promises to turn their careers upside down in a very short time."
Forrester reported recently that business tasks other than e-mail, contacts and calendar are still fairly rare on mobile devices. But we're seeing more and more specialized software coming to mobiles. For example, LeapFactor's SAP-based expense approval app. The new mobile version of Adobe's LiveCycle is also geared towards created simple, mobile apps for common business tasks like expense approval.
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Everyday Frogloop scours the web for the best blog posts that we think nonprofit campaigners must read. Who caught our attention this week? Geoff Livingston and Rebecca Leet. Check them out and feel free to share your own picks of the week.
Punk Social Media
Geoff Livingston wrote a provocative blog post about “how we are in the midst of a new media revolution where norms and “best practices” have been dictated by an echo chamber, mostly by top tier bloggers, that don’t necessarily understand the medium or deserve the ability to dictate best practices. 
It’s a time for punk social media.”
This is an excellent post for the nonprofit community to read because many nonprofits are obsessed with numbers particularly when it comes to social media. Nonprofits are facing new pressures ranging from Board Members to consultants to win the social media battle. Who has the most fans? Who is tweeting more? Does more “Shares” mean some organizations are more effective at advocating for policy change? Give me a break!
“You can see punk tones rising throughout the space,” said Livingston. “People are losing faith in the follower counts, popularity contests, influence determinations (often based on bad formulas), and control your message dictates. Don’t forget, more than 10 tweets a day is bad! Consider the birth of unicorn social media, the star spin smackdown, and the anti-influence project.
“Why so much discontent? Because people are having BS stuffed down their throats on “proper” social media use.”
Millions of tweets run through Twitter. It's the poster child for big data on the Web.
To get data out of Twitter and use it to track sentiment requires tools with considerable processing and computational capabilities.
BigSheets is a tool created by IBM that takes terabytes or even petabytes of Web data and turns it into information that provides business intelligence. The tool can be used for structured or unstructured data from internal or external sources. For instance, it can run streams of Twitter data for days, weeks or even months on particular keywords. That data can then be mashed up with internal information.
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To demonstrate its capabilties, IBM Evangeist David Barnes created an excellent demonstration video that shows how Twitter can be mined for sentiment about the iPhone, BlackBerry or Android mobile smartphones.
We took some segments from the video to explain a process that is not nearly as technical as we thought it would be.
Barnes showed how the tool mined Twitter for tweets that mentioned the smartphone terms: iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. He then tracked the tweets for sentiment. Do people like, love or hate the products? Do they want to buy the products?
The tool can also be used to track multiple web sites for hours, days, weeks or months.
During the video, Barnes mined the Twitter stream for three minutes using the smartphone keywords. He had previously ran a query for 36 hours to demonstrate hopw the data can be used. It pulled 305,000 tweets into the application.
BigSheets classified it by the name of the user, the time of the tweet, what the tweet said and other associated metadata.
Barnes then applied the sentiment language to the analysis. About 50,000 tweets showed sentiment. He then sought out tweets that expressed a sentiment to buy something.
Barnes then applied visualizaton software to create a tag cloud of the analyzed tweets.
In his last example, Barnes showed how BigSheets can scrape data from Web sites to do analysis. He did a query for people, places and things. That data resulted in data about crime and other matters. He cross referenced that data with the members of pariiament voting records.
Like any good demo, Barnes leaves us with more questions about big data than we ever had before.
Take Facebook, for example. What would Mark Zuckerberg have created if he had this tool when creating the now famous social network? What will future developers create with tools like this built into what they create?
BigSheets is one of several data mining tools we are seeing that use MapReduce and other techniques to mine data. What's amazing is what the tools an do but also the accessibility of the tools themselves.
Discuss
The 2010 mid-term election campaign saw unprecedented fundraising from both traditional political players like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and new, secretive conservative entities like American Crossroads. Political campaigns have proven to be amazing laboratories for experimenting with new online fundraising and organizing tactics, from the Dean Campaign and Meetup, to mybarackobama.com. So what can online fundraisers and campaigners learn from this year's experiments? Join Taryn Rosenkranz, Director of Marketing and New Media for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Teddy Goff, Associate VP of Strategy at Blue State Digital and Director of New Media for the battleground states on the Obama 2008 Presidential campaign on November 9th at 2PM EST as they look back on the 2010 campaign and explore the new tactics and trends that worked, and the reliable techniques that no winning candidate can go without. The webinar will be hosted by Eric Rardin, Director of Nonprofit Services at Care2.
Participants will learn the following:
1) What strategies and tactics worked and flopped for raising money online? An email list? Facebook Ads?
2) How was 2010 different and what new trends had an impact this year.
3) Tips for list building, frequency of messaging, asks that work, integration with offline, etc.
When: Tuesday, November 9, 2010 at 2PM Eastern Time.
We have a limited amount of teleconference lines, so please take a moment to sign up now. It's free.
We're always on the lookout for upcoming Web tech events from around world. Know of something taking place that should appear here? Want to get your event included in the calendar? Let us know in the comments below or email us.
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