The power of digital crowds extends beyond kickstarting and vigilanteism. As National Breast Cancer Month draws to a close, we take a look at how scientists are using social platforms and gaming technology to further cancer research. Plus: Oregon Ducks, hackathons, and the origin of symbolic pink.
Links:
From art to cancer patient care, consumer goods to the NBA, Big Data is piling up and these companies are finding ways to make sense of it all. Scroll through the slideshow below to find out how.
Through the above examples of striking visualizations to interactive user experiences, we’re seeing companies and individuals find unique ways to leverage the data and insights being collected daily. How are you seeing Big Data used within your industry? Do you have any examples? Let us know!
Continue reading Creative ways companies are making use of Big DataHello and welcome to our Meet the Team series, in which we aim to give you deeper insight into the minds and personalities of those who make up this eclectic, close-knit group. We are developers, marketers, and technical support engineers, and at work we craft everything from Microsoft reporting APIs to mobile email applications. And outside of work? Let’s just say racing against the machine during hackathons, building architecturally sound beer towers during retros, and paddling down the Charles during the warmer months are simply the beginning.
Meet Seth – our quality control man, subscriber of (and living) This Developer’s Life, most closely personified by a strong spring lager, and powerless to the smile a clever line of code brings.
1. What do you do?
I’m a software engineer on the OfficeWriter team, so I spend my days hunting bugs, implementing cool new features, and trying to come up with new products.
2. What are you listening to right now?
Lake Street Dive – Clear a Space
3. If you could build any app, what would it be and why?
A contact de-duplication/management app that actually works well.
Also a bus/train app that just shows all departure times at the nearest stop…why do I need to choose a stop? My phone knows where I am!
4. When you were 5 what did you want to be and why?
In my early years I wanted to be a nature and wildlife photographer, working for National Geographic. I was always going around taking pictures of landscapes and animals. On our family trips to national parks, my younger brother and I would always get as close as we could to the wildlife (including a grizzly bear once) to get a good photo.
5. If you were a beer what would you be and why? Continue reading Meet the Team: Seth
Learn how OfficeWriter can put data in the hands of your business users.
When: Friday, October 18th at 1 P.M.
In this webinar:
We’re looking at what the average American spends on Halloween each year from costumes to candy to decorations. Importing this data into Excel using OfficeWriter, we’ll see which costumes outrank the rest. Is it Miley Cyrus, your favorite decade garb, or the ever-popular witches and ghosts? We’ll find out, along with what Americans spend on these once-a-year ensembles, mounds of candy, and gobs of decorations. You’ll take away new tricks for creating reports in Excel and maybe a DIY Halloween costume idea or two.
What we’ll cover:
Native ads. Brands as publishers. #BreakingBad. Target telling your dad you’re pregnant. Advertising may have lost its 3 martini lunches, but it’s gained a position at the forefront of both high-tech and narrative innovation. On this episode of Truth in Tech, we talk to Hill Holiday‘s Austin Gardner-Smith about the industry’s future, and the cultural and technological shifts behind it.
Want to guest star? Have an interesting tech topic, startup, or story of the week? Email us at elisek@softartisans.com! Or find us roaming the Twittosphere @elisekovi and @clairedwillett.
[Stories from the Women in Tech Trenches is a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Every woman in tech overcame, at the very least, statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. This week we met up with Laura Wallendal, Co-Founder and COO of EdTrips. EdTrips is a travel company centered around the school field-trip process and keeping the focus on learning rather than logistics. With a background in languages and art history, Laura found that fusing the tech world with her passions of travel and education could create meaningful strides in the classroom. Laura shows that the tech trenches are not solely relegated to those within the math and science fields. If reading her story inspires you to share yours, please email me.]
I’m the Co-Founder and COO of EdTrips, an edtech and travel company. Originally from Friendship, Wisconsin, I moved to Boston in 2004 and co-founded EdTrips in 2011 after years of experience in the educational travel industry. At EdTrips, I head up strategic partnerships and business development.
Questions:
1. Can you take us back to your “eureka!” moment—a particular instance or event that got you interested in technology?
It wasn’t until after training for my first mud run obstacle course in 2010 that I became interested in solving problems with technology. I wanted a way to coordinate with other people who had the same interest in crazy obstacle course events. That led me to create my first website. At the same time, I was working in the educational travel industry and seeing a lot of ways that things could be done better—for instance, the basic ways in which travel was booked. Solving a problem using technology for my personal interests gave me the confidence to begin tackling those problems I saw in educational travel, and begin seeing that I could start to solve them.
2. Growing up, did you have any preconceived perceptions of the tech world and the kinds of people who lived in it?
No. I wasn’t really exposed to the tech world until I got to college. Growing up in rural Wisconsin, I was one of the first kids in my grade to have a home computer, and our family had internet access before my elementary school even did, so technology wasn’t a focus in the community. Given my tech-sheltered past, I never imagined starting a tech company.
3. You co-founded EdTrips in 2011, and since it’s been a way to integrate technology within the classroom. Can you tell us a little about EdTrips and the company’s overall mission?
EdTrips is a tool to streamline planning and managing school travel. Whether a field trip, overnight trip or overseas trip, EdTrips is an open and flexible platform that decreases the workload for the trip organizer. It handles everything from payment collection to forms, so travelers and educators can focus on learning, not logistics. It’s our mission to make travel a part of everyone’s education.
4. What was the inspiration behind EdTrips?
After working for a large educational travel company, I moved on to do consulting for 3 small travel abroad companies. Doing sales and business development for both large and small companies, it was evident that trip organizers were in need of a solution to help manage travel online, the way individual travelers have so many tools to use. Doing payment collection by hand, managing accounting and recruiting travelers with spreadsheets and inviting people with emails, phone calls and flyers is time consuming and we knew there had to be a better way.
5. What led you to this career path? When did you first start working with tech? Was it by choice?
After realizing the work I was doing with teachers and schools could be done better with technology, I immediately called a friend from college for advice. He recommended I look into building a platform using Ruby and made introductions to several development shops around town to get quotes and find that sweet spot for our Minimum Viable Product. I gave myself a crash course in a new way of thinking and solving problems. I was hooked! It was absolutely by choice and now I could not see myself doing anything else.
6. Did you experience any personal or systemic setbacks at any point of your academic or professional career?
Yes, I have faced both personal and systematic setbacks in my academic and professional career.
When I was in college, my younger sister passed away of Leukemia and my academic career was severely disrupted. I took a semester off and transferred schools to be closer to home and got my higher education back on track.
When it came to looking for a job, like many recent grads, I found it a challenge to find what was right for me. Eventually I landed in sales for an educational travel company and found something I was truly successful at, enjoyed, and found rewarding. I was the top performing sales person on my team, but found the politics a turn-off. I switched teams and eventually decided to leave altogether and work for myself. Continue reading Stories from the WIT Trenches: Laura Wallendal
Another Monday, another work week. Unlike every other Monday, however, today ushers in the month of October and with it Boston’s Idea Week. Reawaken your inspiration, and herald in the new month with this entrepreneurial-centered event, taking place in the Seaport’s Innovation District. Plus, check out a handful of other tech-related events geared toward entrepreneurs, start-ups, and the generally curious. So get out-and-about the city, meet your next VC or co-founder, explore new ideas, welcome the change in season, and add these Boston events to your calendar.
When: Oct 1-10
Where: Innovation District – at the Seaport
Details: Each day a new activity. Aimed at furthering the growth of Boston’s Innovation District, this week-long event is working “to bring together Boston’s change-makers, leaders, creative thinkers, entrepreneurs and world-class college students to share and celebrate innovative ideas, products, networks and businesses that are being tested and formed in Boston.”
http://www.bostonideaweek.org/
Twitter: #IdeaWk13 @BosIdeaWk
When: Oct 1
Where: Microsoft New England Research & Development (NERD) Center
Details: Who doesn’t love breakfast? Made for techies, developers, designers, and entrepreneurs, this meetup is true to its namesake. Over a bagel and coffee, share in the monthly show-and-tell format of presentations by local start-ups. Contact them for the opportunity to showcase your company.
RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Boston-TechBreakfast/events/128096822/
When: Oct 16
Where: The Boston Globe – 135 Morrissey Blvd., Dorchester, MA
Details: Three Nieman fellows will “discuss the growth and impact of digital and social media in Latin America, India, China—how users are employing technology to report and comment on the news, organize and motivate civic groups, and circumvent government controls.”
Speakers: Leslie Hook, Beijing correspondent for the Financial Times; Hasit Shah, senior broadcast journalist at BBC News in London; Daniel Eilemberg, founder and editor-in-chief of Animal Político
RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/hackshackersboston/events/140537532/
[In OfficeWriter 8.6 we introduced support for sparklines in your Excel reports. Sparklines are mini graphs that live within a cell of your Excel spreadsheet to quickly visualize and identify trends in your data. Below is an example of how to use sparklines within OfficeWriter reports.]
Hi! My name is Kyle and I worked on developing support for sparklines in ExcelTemplate. For those unfamiliar, a sparkline is basically a small chart that lives in a single cell. Sparklines are a great way to quickly visualize trends in data, especially if they are located in cells near their data source.
Below we’ve put together a demo of using sparklines within OfficeWriter’s ExcelTemplate. The first step is to insert data markers and sparklines into the file. Here I’ve inserted a sparkline next to the row of data markers and created a group of sparklines immediately below the data markers. The data source for the sparkline in cell E1 is A1:D1. The data source for the sparkline in cell A2 is A1 and so on for the rest of the group. Continue reading Sparklines in OfficeWriter
[Stories from the Women in Tech Trenches is a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Every woman in tech overcame, at the very least, statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. This week we met up with Emma Ideal, an author, physicist, and inspirational woman in tech. If reading her story inspires you to share yours, please email me.]
Emma Ideal received a Bachelor’s degree in physics from UCLA in 2009 and is now in her fifth year of doctoral studies in physics at Yale University. She is working on a thesis in particle physics, performing a search for the elusive Standard Model Higgs Boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider located near Geneva, Switzerland.
Questions:
1.) You’re doing ground-breaking work in particle physics at CERN at the Hadron Collider, especially at an exciting time in physics as the Higgs Boson particle is gaining more worldwide recognition. Can you tell us a little about that?
As you say, I landed in graduate school at a very good time! The Higgs Boson is a fundamental particle that was theorized to exist in 1964, so it’s taken almost 50 years to find evidence of its existence. The Higgs is an unstable particle, meaning quickly after its production, it “decays into” other particles. Therefore, we discover the Higgs Boson not by observing the Higgs itself, but by observing these daughter particles. There are many different particles the Higgs can decay into, and my research focuses on particles called taus. These are essentially heavier versions of the familiar electron. The discovery of the Higgs Boson gives us insight into how the various fundamental particles have acquired mass (and are therefore not whizzing around our universe at the speed of light!).
2.) You just recently authored the book, Blazing the Trail: Essays by Leading Women in Science, a collection of essays of renowned female physicists, engineers, and chemists – can you tell us a little about that? How did the idea come about and what inspired you to do it?
In April 2011, I flew halfway around the world to South Africa as a U.S. delegate to the 4th International Conference on Women in Physics. There, I stumbled upon a workshop focused on methods for attracting girls to physics. A member of the Indian Academy of Sciences presented on his book Lilavati’s Daughters, a compilation of essays written by female Indian physicists. I was inspired to create an analogous book for an American audience, where essayists describe what brought them to the sciences, recount gender-related issues they’ve faced and have overcome, and give advice to the next generation on how to successfully launch a career in the sciences today. Readers will have a look into what a physicist’s life is really like, see that science is fundamentally about curiosity and asking (and finding answers to!) hard questions, and discover how attainable success is with the right attitude and work ethic. In addition, many young women can feel isolated in the career and gender challenges they face, and my hope is that from reading the essays within they see that, in fact, they are not alone!
We all know there is a gross under-representation of women in most sciences, and in particular physics. Blazing the Trail: Essays by Leading Women in Science was created to inspire a new generation of young women to consider careers in STEM, attacking this problem of Continue reading Stories from the WIT Trenches: Emma Ideal
Coming to a college near you. We’re seeking inventive college students with object-oriented programming under their belts, a penchant for amassing new skills and those who don’t mind a few BBQs. Think you’ve got the coding chops to work in this dynamic office? Then we want to meet you. If your school is not listed below, drop us a note, and tell us why you dream in C#. Links to projects, coding samples, and other ways to showcase your craft are the best way to catch our eye (wink, wink).
Internships | Co-ops | Full-time. We’re big on hands-on learning and career development. In years past we’ve had interns work on product demos, pick up a new programming language, and share their expertise on our blog. Your work will have a direct impact on the company and product. Interested? Stop by our booth to chat with one of our engineers!
Who we are: A close-knit, dynamic, and agile team. We work hard: Crafting artful code while solving challenging problems. We play hard: Office foosball, board games, cookouts, and company retreats. We’re encouraged to develop our skill sets by attending conferences and classes.
What we do: We aim to make business people more productive through all of our products. As a leading developer of Microsoft Office reporting software, we build scalable enterprise solutions. Our products are OfficeWriter (an API for reading and writing Microsoft Office documents) and FileUp (a secure and easy-to-use File Transfer API).
Find out more about internship and career opportunities at SoftArtisans and how to join the SA Crew (and get in on those BBQs) by interacting with us on all of the usual social media hotspots or visiting one of the career fairs below. Looking forward to seeing you then!
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
12:30 – 4:30 pm
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
11 am – 4 pm
@RITCareerFairs
Friday, September 27, 2013
10 am – 3:30 pm Continue reading Fall Career Fairs: Have You Got What it Takes?
